Quotes About Writing

More and more, he relied on alcohol to numb himself from the pain of his relationship with Estelle, his anxiety about Meta, the difficulties of writing, and his inability to confront crises that inevitably came his way, such as the deaths of friends and family. Certainly the death of Dean continued to flood him with guilt over his part in encouraging his brother in his career as an aviator and, indeed, selling him the plane that had brought him down.

Writers are always pirates, marauding, taking whatever pleases them from others, shaping these stolen goods to our purposes.

I am often asked why I use a variety of pen names. The answer is that this way readers always know which of my three worlds they will be entering when they pick up one of my books.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

Despite membership in the guild of outcasts, writers do, by quirk of fate or sex or addiction or parenthood, become intimate with others, with those who don't originate from the planet of words and language. Other things do happen, but we don't know what they are until we write about them, or think about them in words, or remember them in phrases. - From "Why She Writes

Talent is like a faucet; while it is open, you have to write. Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

John Marshall on writing: The man who by seeking embellishment hazards confusion, is greatly mistaken in what constitutes good writing. The meaning ought never to be mistaken. Indeed, the reader should never be obliged to search for it.

Only when a book is written out of passion is there much hope of its being read with passion.

We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.

Je hasarde une explication : écrire c'est le dernier recours quand on a trahi.

May I venture an explanation: writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed

To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.

Jean Hanff Korelitz

Everything about the guy screamed FICTION WRITER, though the species itself broke down more or less evenly into the subcategories: 1. Great American Novelist 2. -New York Times- Bestselling Author Or that highly rare hybrid... 3. -New York Times- Bestselling Great American Novelist

All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him.

Good writers borrow, great writers steal, Jake was thinking.

Either it's a good plot or it isn't. And if it's not a good plot, the best writing isn't going to help. And if it is, the worst writing isn't going to hurt it.

I just care about the story. Either it's a good plot or it isn't. And if it's not a good plot, the best writing isn't going to help. And if it is, the worst writing isn't going to hurt it.

I have to admit that this notebook, with its wilderness of blank pages, seems almost more threat than gift—for what can I write here that it will not hurt to remember? You

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.

Writing is the hardest work I've ever done. I'm a mother, I had five children, I was working full-time, I was going to university at night, I got a master's degree in business administration, and I did all those things at the same time--and writing is the hardest thing.

The first draft of the entire six book series was written at one time, in one single burst of creative energy, over a four month period of 12 to 16 hour days of sustained writing, during which I did almost nothing else except additional research. I thought at the time that it would be one novel, Earth's Children, but it fell into six parts. It was only on rewriting that I realized that I had instead written an in-depth outline for a six book series.