Quotes About Writing

If he didn't like the writing, then he didn't like her, and everything she had done in her whole life would be for nothing.

I have never met a writer who didn't need an editor, and an editor without a writer is a person without a job. It is a fraught and often-imperfect relationship, of course, dating back to the beginning of time. You remember; after God moved upon the darkness, he proclaimed, "I've put in place some very wondrous illumination here!" And Mrs. God gently suggested the more pithy: 'Let there be light.

Smith answered immediately, writing at midnight on June 22. "We dare not come," he insisted—three times. "Your Excellency promises protection. Yet, at the same time, you have expressed fears that you could not control

Having screwed around the last hour trying to decide whether to write in the style of Isaac Asimov (that version featured Caitlin as a Venusian chick with one eye and three breasts) or Dr. Seuss ("I am Nick/Nick is sick/Nick tells Debbie to…" well, you get the idea)

A lot of food criticism has a similar flavor to it, and I'm probably going to write about it in a different way.

You can write anything you want on the internet, and it has the potential to become famous

To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth, but into it.

When I am gripped with despair, when I think I might stop, I speak to my dead. Tell them a story. What am I doing with this life? They hold me accountable. I let them make me bolder or more modest or louder or more moving, but I ask them to listen, and then write.

Yes, everything's been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible.

Writers aren't born, they're made--from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.

1. Sometimes music is needed. 2. Sometimes silence. 3. A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one, then, is like remembering a song you've never heard before.

Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work.

the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure and success.

My first novel was not the first one I started. It was the first one I finished.

There was something I wanted to feel, and I felt it only when I was writing.

It's a strange time to teach someone to write stories. But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.

PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do.

My mother's most common childhood memory of me is standing next to me trying to be heard over the voice on the page. I didn't really commit to writing until I understood that it meant making that happen for someone else.

I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew and I know that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so difficult to change, to easily changed.

It's much like writing an essay or including autobiographical content in fiction—to succeed, it requires an ability to be coldly impersonal about yourself and your state, so as not to cloud what is there with what you want to see.

Sometimes the writer writes one novel, then another, then another, and the first one he sells is the first one the public sees - but mostly, the debut novel is almost never the first novel the writer wrote. There's a private idea of the writer, known to the writer and whoever rejected him previously, and a public one, visibly only in publication. Each book is something of a mask of the troubles that went into it and so is the writer's visible career.

When writers in New York complained they could not write after 9/11, it seemed to me they were frozen by writing for that audience, by writing for the missing. Who we all felt, somehow, were watching. Waiting to see if we were worthy of being alive when they were dead. Waiting to see the stories we would tell about the life they would no longer have among us - waiting to see if it was worth it.

For the novelists in your life I have heard it said that it is better if you pretend they do something else and that it is always attended to, and doesn't need your attention in the slightest. And then when asked for support, muster an enormous enthusiasm.