Quotes About Writing

I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that, I thought golf writers got up every morning, played a round of golf, had lunch, showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner.

As I sat here. With eyes closed softly I think deeply of "you" And I inhale stars The scent of twinkling light So fresh and alive Sparkling gentle inside me And I want to write this feeling So tentatively As it must be Like writing words on bubbles Delicate and precious Begging them not to disappear Like dreams in the morning ...

The sustaining interest and enthusiasm of many friends and colleagues are, of course, the nutrition that every writer needs, and can never adequately acknowledge.

No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great, and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure.

While he was at Oxford University his fascination for the Anglo-Saxon period intensified. It was a couplet from Cynewulf's poem 'Crist', which ran: 'Hail, Earendel, brightest of angels, over Middle Earth sent to men', that inspired his creation of the imaginary world that would form the setting for most of his writing.

In his famous essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell concluded with six emphatic rules, including "never use a long word where a short one will do" and "never use the passive where you can use the active." But the sixth rule was the key: "Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

Nobody writes a book. What you write every day is a piece of a book, a fragment, a scene.

The fastest way to write is to pretend you have all the time in the world.

It's always seemed odd to me that nonfiction is defined, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not fiction. But then again, it is also not poetry, or technical writing or libretto. It's like defining classical music as nonjazz.

The music that I was playing and writing in those early years, that I was importing to Europe, was quintessentially New York music in a way that I always hoped it would be. I wanted my concert music to be as distinctive as Zappa at the Fillmore East, and I think I ended up doing that.

Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. 'Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it's written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.

One doesnt write about anything. One just writes.

Depressing realization sets in. Writing was invented not by human beings but by accountants. Most of the early writing systems are records of how much crap people own, how much money they have, how much money they owe, and other lowering/boastful facts of human life.

Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.

There is bad in all good authors

What one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, the kind of environment one has had and has now. One doesn't really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or one can write.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

If she were writing by candlelight she would now be in the dark, for a living flame would refuse to be fed by such pure exhaustion. Actually she is in the dark, for the

If she were writing by candlelight she would now be in the dark, for a living flame would refuse to be fed by such pure exhaustion.

What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, "Is he as crazy as I am?" I don't need that question answered.