Quotes About Writing

Many people like books because they're suspenseful or scary or touching or inspirational or because one admires the characters as if they were real people. Maybe it's only writers who like the writing.

I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt.

Critics always praise precision in writing, and some great writers (Joyce, Beckett, Gustave Flaubert) are masters of clarity—but one of the great (and seldom mentioned) resources of fiction is vagueness.

Everything we wrote was submitted to the editors above us, grizzled Korean War pilots with buzz cuts and an encyclopedic knowledge, who would routinely bounce our copy back and demand "fixes" ("More color," "Doesn't track," or simply "Huh?" written in the margin).

I'm not sure what readers want.

What if I could write about my life exactly as it was? What if I could show it in all its density and tedium and its concealed passion, never divined or expressed, the dull brown geode that eats at itself with quartz teeth?

At my age (seventy-eight), I realize that everyone, or almost everyone except Hitler, will be forgotten from this period; if a writer can shore up an eroding coastline for a decade or two, that's the only "immortality" we'll ever know on this dying planet.

Se o Velho e o Novo Testamentos representam a Revelação Divina, tais investigações não têm importância. Se eles são obra puramente humana, então é a curiosidade humana que nos impele a investigar como foram escritos e qual é sua relação com um culto de imenso prestígio

Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.

Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

Life can't ever really defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death – fascinating, cruel, lavish, warm, cold, treacherous, constant.

Although one might seem relatively gregarious, the real self is at the desk," she said. "It is a trial for relationships, for friendships. Every writer dreads losing the connection to the work, the momentum, and to keep it, you can't truly be sociable.

I wish you'd come for six months. I seem to have got a big burst of energy writing this whereas sometimes I haven't enough strength to hold pen or pencil. You will find that one day as you get older. I worry about you and your traveling to the different places. Nowhere is safe now. My undying love to you.

You might have written. Every bit of your daily life interests me. I wrote this day fortnight but it was returned. Tampered with.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

Writers have this schizophrenic ability to both participate in their lives and, at the same time, observe themselves participating in their lives.

A modern Greek, who could write the life of a saint without adding fables and miracles, is entitled to some commendation.

Another d-mn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?

On November 18 of alternate years Mr Earbrass begins writing 'his new novel'. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply.

Mr. Earbrass has rashly been skimming through the early chapters, which he had not looked at for months, and now sees TUH for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful , DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Mad. Why did n't he become a spy? How does one become one? He will burn the MS. Why is there no fire? Why are n't there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?

He wrote it all down Zealously.

the historian's need of imaginative understanding for the minds of the people with whom he is dealing, for the thought behind their acts: I say imaginative understanding, not sympathy, lest sympathy should be supposed to imply agreement ... History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.

Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger: cool guys, smart, lotta meat between the ears on those fellas, and certainly trying to define who we are in the world or the universe is a noble undertaking. But isn't it somewhat as legitimate to try to define the reason why people do the horrible things they do? It's a fascinating query for me. It's a kick. Hence, my plight. I write horror.