Quotes About Writing

He had become so caught up in building sentences that he had almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of color landing on a page.

What I learned from my father and uncle, I learned out of sequence and in fragments. This is an attempt at cohesiveness, and at re-creating a few wondrous and terrible months when their lives and mine intersected in startling ways, forcing me to look forward and back at the same time. I am writing this only because they can't.

When you write it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring them unity. Your fingers have still not perfected the task. Some of the braids are long, others are short. Some are thick, others are thin. Some are heavy. Others are light. Like the diverse women in your family. Those whose fables and metaphors, whose similes, and soliloquies, whose diction and je ne sais quoin daily slip into your survival soup, by way of their fingers

First novels are a lot like first children. You lavish all your love and attention on them, but you also make all your rookie mistakes on them. First novels teach you how to write. They are your initial opportunity to put into practice everything you've heard about long-haul narrative. They're your primary attempt at trying to walk in the footsteps of the giant (and not so giant) writers you revere and adore.

Let's leave the window, and write. No need to wait for a fine blue to break through. We must live, make do.

He severely forbade the custom of Valentines or giving boys, in writing, the names of girls to be admired and attended on by them; and, to abolish it

I can't not put humor in a book.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

Something had to be done. Apart from robbing a bank—a line of endeavor for which I lacked the needful preliminary training—I saw no way to get ahead in the world except by forcing some kind of opening for myself as a fiction writer. Thenceforth, for several years, I set aside five hours a night, five nights a week, for this kind of work. After my nine-hour office day, I came home, got a shower and a rubdown; and as soon as dinner was ended, I went to my desk and began writing.

Daughter," said the grim old Presbyterian, "you can serve God and mankind as worthily with a gift like yours as you could by going as a missionary to the heathen. God gave you the rare power to write. You would be ungrateful to Him if you neglected it. Go on with your work.

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

I've written this to keep from crying. But I am crying, only the tears won't come.

Quiero estudiar, quiero aprender, quiero escribir. Tengo veintidós años. No sé nada. Nada fundamental. No sé lo que debería haber aprendido hace muchos años. Nadie me enseñó nada. Sé, en cambio, lo que debería saber mucho después. De allí que me sienta anciana y niña al mismo tiempo.

to write is to give meaning to suffering

Es penoso escribir un libro que exige una continuidad. Además, no tengo ganas de contar nada.

Every word I write restores me to the absence of why I write what I wouldn't write if I allowed you to come here.

Las novelas nunca las han escrito mas que los que son incapaces de vivirlas.

Miente. Bea miente, como mentimos todas. No escribe para que la escuchen. Escribe porque no la escuchan. No es lo mismo. O puede que sí.

Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.

Escribir no vale de nada si no acarrea la agotadora e irresoluble carga de las decisiones sin consecuencia alguna.

Do you hear that, Dillon? Inadvertent self-wedgie! Write that down! That's what you want your characters to say, not some anodyne bullshit about corporate greed.

Non sento affatto il bisogno di scrivere storie di vincitori. Penso che ogni vittoria sia falsa. Vera è solo la sconfitta, perché la vita è in definitiva sempre una sconfitta, a meno che non sia, dal principio alla fine, un'illusione. E le illusioni non mi attirano.