Quotes About Writing

Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.

I taught writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania for a number of years and I realized that all you can do is encourage people and give them assignments and hope they will write them.

I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.

This is writing. You cut out chunks of your own memories, rework them, bleed into them, breathe into the raw clay, and hope the creature lives.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

I hope I can write toward my interests. But poets should be afraid of too fluidly responding to what they're interested in.

I hope nobody I wrote about becomes too upset.

The process of writing is a process of learning; and much has become clearer to me in the attempt to transform my original rough notes into what I hope is an intelligible presentation.

It's possible that I've matured as a writer, and I hope I've matured emotionally, but I always find myself revisiting these adolescent scenes.

As a writer, I don't think it's my responsibility to make a point. I just write and hope there's someone who'll like it.

You never write down to the people - you write the best you can with the hope that someone else will feel the same way.

My hope when I wrote the first book was that I would get to do it again. But it was not entirely clear that that would happen.

I very much hope that when my wife reads my writings so she reads it as if she is a character and not the real one. Sometimes she takes it too personally.

When I went in, my editor said, 'I hope you don't think you're a writer.' And I said, 'I hope you don't think I'm a journalist.' And, uh, turned out we were both right.

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.

I hope to continue writing. I hope to continue teaching.

I'd pretty much given up hope of being published, so I just wrote the book I wanted to read.

There is always a gap between conception and execution. We keep writing in the burning hope of closing that gap before we die.

If we keep our dreams in our head they can be forgotten, If we write down our dreams they become tangible, Once they are physical, they have taken the first step in becoming attainable.

Writing is a way of sharing our humanity.

The - writing is a kind of act of aggression, and a person who is not aggressive in his normal, may I say, intercourse with humanity might well be an aggressive writer.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean - hell, I know that.

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.