Quotes About Writing

There is just too much cruelty, selfishness and corruption in the world not to want to crush the poisonous will of those who cause it by writing about it as powerfully as I can.

A writer's tragedy: to know all the words and nothing else.

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

Writing is one of the most ancient forms of prayer. To write is to believe communication is possible that other people are good, that you can awaken their generosity and their desire to do better.

When I write, I try to represent the ordinary person in the pew, which means that, ironically, I'm qualified to write about prayer by being unqualified!

This is the role of writers: to turn their tears into a story - and perhaps into a prayer.

For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers.

I find that it takes a lot of years of living, and many more of reckoning, to come up with one worthwhile paragraph. And when a deadline looms, prayer doesnt hurt, either.

Writing is my form of celebration and prayer.

Writing a poem is like having an affair, a one-night stand; a short story is a romance, a relationship; a novel is a marriage-one has to be cunning, devise compromises, and make sacrifices.

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it

If I believed people who told me you can't make a living as a writer, I wouldn't be making a living as a writer.

Well, if this is poetry, it is very easy to write.

If you can't find the book you want to read, write it.

Mostly, I like to use my writing to fuck shit up. And I like to teach my writing students how to use some of the same queer rhetorical strategies in their writing. Witnessing them experience, for themselves, where the compulsion to fuck shit up comes from is exciting and, at times, transformative.

Here's a tip more academic authors could heed: don't make "originality" your only goal. If there is one common failure in letters from first-time authors it's the suggestion that nothing like this manuscript has ever been attempted. If you've found a dark corner of the field to mine as your own, you might have lucked into something valuable and overlooked

You can't lead bunny lives and write tiger poetry.

And the sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy. The Exorcist not only ended that career, it expunged all memory of its existence.

Good writing is rhythm.

clear benefit of writing legal memoranda is that when it comes to learning how to write well, nothing beats practice. As a junior associate you'll find that over time, you'll learn to draft memoranda that present logical, clear analyses of even the most complicated legal issues.