Quotes About Writing

I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion then she lies.

I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.

I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything.

I was in a vicious cycle: writing and reading seemed to be the only way to beat back the loneliness, but they also reinforced it

There are numerous layers to truth, and the simple and superficial statement of facts cannot satisfy the writer.

Writing is a kind of repository and can help create a space for the accommodation of new thoughts and feelings. If you don't write these stories down, your heart will be filled up and broken by them.

Writing can be a source of strength -Wang Liang

La escritura es una especie de sala de exposición, y un almacén que puede ayudar a crear un espacio para dar cabida a nuevas ideas y sentimientos. Si no pones estas historias por escrito, tu corazón se colmará de ellas y se romperá.

When the surface of your soul begins to stir, I imagine you want to capture the sensation in writing.

When the surface of your soul begins to stir, I imagine you want to capture the sensation in writing." - Yoko Ogawa

I suspect the only reason I've been able to go on writing is that I've had your heart by my side all along. — Y?ko Ogawa, The Memory Police , transl. Stephen Snyder (Pantheon, 2019)

You can't write with your head. I want you to write with your hand," he said. It was rare for him to make a pronouncement like this, so I found myself simply nodding in silence. Then I stretched my hand toward him, fingers extended. "That's right. That's where the story should come from," he said, but he looked away, as though he had seen into the most vulnerable part of my body.

You can't write with your head. I want you to write with your hand

It must feel much like a typewriter key falling back into place after rising for a moment to strike the page.

The gentle patter of the rain was punctuated by the scratching of pencil on paper.

Writing isn't particularly different from hibernation. Perhaps I made a drowsy impression, but in the bear's den of my brain, I was giving birth to my own childhood and secretly attending to its upbringing.

None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future. Some have expressed the very opposite feeling--the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.

Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.

fasciné par les mots... ces assemblages de caractères morts qui, pris entre une majuscule et un point, ressuscitaient d'un coup, devenaient phrases, devenaient foules, devenaient force et esprit. Tout

Envidiar es renegar de sí mismo, joven. Te vuelves triste y malvado y no ganas nada a cambio. Los únicos momentos que importan son los que nos producen alguna alegría. Lo demás es puro derroche. Si quieres escribir, escribe. Pero no es criticando el talento ajeno como se afianza el propio. El talento no es negociable.

Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.

How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?

To be a writer - write! To be an author - publish! To be a bestselling author - never stop writing!