Quotes About Writing

You write because you have an idea in your mind that feels so genuine, so important, so true. And yet, by the time this idea passes through the different filters of your mind, and into your hand, and onto the page or computer screen - it becomes distorted, and it's been diminished.

I write about what happens in my life - and my dad's passing was a huge blow to me.

A boy with a story must write.

Hoe bang ik ook was, ik besefte dat dit altijd het lot van een dichter zou zijn: geïsoleerd en alleen te zijn, naar antwoorden te haken, met als gezelschap slechts letters en niet-aflatende kwellingen.

Next to the defeated politician, the writer is the most vocal and inventive griper on earth. He sees hardship and unfairness wherever he looks. His agent doesn't love him (enough). The blank sheet of paper is an enemy. The publisher is a cheapskate. The critic is a philistine. The public doesn't understand him. His wife doesn't understand him. The bartender doesn't understand him.

Instead of discussing with myself every morning whether I feel inspired or not, I step into my office every day at nine sharp, open the window and politely ask the muse to enter and kiss me. Sometimes she comes in, more often she does not. But she can never claim that she hasn't found me waiting in the right place.

Here in the notebooks I've let it out, I've collected all these different words. The ones in the yellow notebook, they found me, they find me still. They are the words that came from beyond, because I was ready to receive them. And then the rest of the words, these words I'm writing now--they don't feel so different, they also come through me. I listen in; I intercept them. I receive these words and send them out again, so they can reach the next person.

The sheer amount of ideological conflicts playing out within the text hints at the fact that the writers were writing about a reality that could not be reduced to one description, a reality that was testified to better in the clash of perspectives than in the development of a single, finely honed one. The text was written not to be approached as an academic document detailing facts about the life of faith but rather as an invitation into the life of faith.

Something I worry about a lot when I write, that I'm less worried about with a computer, is about the ways in which English is ambiguous. I'm constantly worrying about ways in which the reader might misinterpret what I've written. So I've actually spent a lot of time consciously crafting the mechanics of my prose style to use constructions that are less likely to be misinterpreted.

And he was like, "No, no, I really think we ought to do that." And I was like, "We don't have time!" So he wrote it that night.

contrast, ancient European access to the experiential world was preformed by grammatical dressage; in fact, in this literacy zone the actual intellectual material offered by the world was formatted according to letter, syllable, line, page, paragraph, and chapter.

Mit jugendlichem Pathos hatte ich geglaubt, mich zwischen ihr und dem Schreiben entscheiden zu müssen, zwischen Liebe und Freiheit. Jetzt erst begriff ich, dass Liebe und Freiheit sich nicht ausschlossen, sondern bedingten, dass das eine nicht ohne das andere möglich war.

David," I said, "no matter what my intentions are, everything I write winds up turning into fiction, including my letters to friends.

Facing a wall when you write really aids your concentration.

I've always had a dislike of any form of didacticism, especially when it becomes the dominant element in writing. Character and emotional content should always be the strong elements. I think that was maybe what went wrong with my early novel, that I wanted it to be too profound, I was trying to put too much into it. I learned fairly early that one can handle only so much idea in a story. Well, or rather, I can!

I quote Frank O'Connor to my students: that when you are writing a story, at some point the story must take over. You are not going to be able to control it. I think this is true. O'Connor said he thought Joyce controls his stories too tightly—"Whoever heard of a Joyce story taking over?" he asked—and that there is a deadness about them. You have got to keep the story opened up, let the story take over at some point.

many such documents of the period, I can say it was written in the Latin of that period and not in more modern form.

Alle, die professionell schreiben, wissen, dass sich ein Gedanke oft erst in der Arbeit an der genauen Formulierung klärt. Sie wissen, dass wir vieles nur schreibend wirklich zu Ende denken können. So wie auch unsere besten Gedanken nicht selten aus dem konzentrierten Prozess des Schreibens heraus entstehen und plötzlich da sind, zu unserer eigenen Überraschung.

You never finish a book. You only abandon it.

I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

Ironically, I've spent years writing sensitive articles for women. Still, one lady wrote: "I have always viewed you with suspicion, knowing that if you were pushed to the limit, if you were forced to make a decision, you weren't really one of us after all. Deep down inside, you are a guy.

I've always believed writing ads is the second most profitable form of writing. The first is ransom notes…

Writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.