Quotes About Writing

I've heard some writers say that they are obsessed with certain ideas and that they find themselves writing around the same obsession again and again, but telling different stories to get at that same idea. I'm beginning to think that I suffer from this syndrome, too.

News writing and sports writing have become synonymous. And it started with, you know, free agency, and now it's in the concussion debate.

Jokes that are gratuitously offensive are synonymous with bad writing to me. I'm offended as a writer first and as a person second.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

When I'm actually writing by hand, I get more of a sense of the rhythm of sentences, of syntax. The switch to the computer is when I actually start thinking about lines. That's the workhorse part. At that point, I'm being more mathematical about putting the poem on the page and less intuitive about the rhythm of the syntax.

A novelist can never be his own reader, except when he is ridding his manuscript of syntax errors, repetitions, or the occasional superfluous paragraph.

As historians write more and more histories, it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy that other historians read their histories and then make synthesis, and certain things just get forgotten and left out and neglected.

If I had been a good student and an achiever, I might have been excited by a more systematic approach to writing than what I do.

A writer need not be bound by flat statement like "It was a rough sea," when verbs like tumble and roil and seethe wait to spell from her pen.

Positioning ourselves, physically and psychologically, on the same plane with our subjects can help us avoid what Gardner refers to as "frigidity" in our writing, one of the "faults of soul" he warns against. Frigidity is coldhearted failure to respond on a deep, human level to the characters and events of our story. Sometimes,

Use only those adjectives that call forth the qualities of the object; avoid adjectives that label or explain. Words like lovely, old, wonderful, noteworthy or remarkable are explanatory labels; they do not suggest sense impressions. Adjectives like bug-eyed, curly, bumpy, frayed or moss-covered, on the other hand, are descriptive.

But who has time to write memoirs? I'm still living my memoirs.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know they real truth about his or her love affairs.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

This is publishing, Kip! Since when does logic have anything to do with it?

Mine is not an obedient writing. I think that literature as any art has to be irreverent.

Being a fugitive living in the woods at the time, I had to write before it got dark. Now darkness was approaching again, only more insidiously.

How did writing come to me? Like bird's down on my windowpane, in winter. Just then there rose in the heart a struggle of firebrands, which has, still now, not ended.

les Péruviens n'ont jamais eu aucun autre procédé d'écriture, alors qu'ils possédaient une langue très parfaite et très raffinée ; cette sorte d'idéographie était rendue possible par de multiples combinaisons dans lesquelles l'emploi de fils de couleurs différentes joue un rôle important.

Sometimes I think they are writers who do not write. That "writers write" is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers that write at all.

You don't want to sound as though you used a Sharper Image catalogue for a thesaurus.

Frey, James, How to Write a Damn Good Novel. Helpful emphasis on the three C's of Premise: character, conflict, and conclusion; useful throughout. One of the damn best books on the subject.