Quotes About Writing

Whenever I write first drafts, I like to maximize the possibility of f-ups, mistakes, mis-written words, digressions, crazy changes in tone, etc. This is why I don't use outlining software or even a computer and why I spread pages and images and research materials kinda crazy across the table. Never know what'll happen.

Writing, for me, is like trying to restart an engine that has rested for years, silent and rusting, in an empty lot--choked with water and dirt, infiltrated by ants and spides and cockroaches. Vines and weeds shoved into it and sprouting of it. A kind of coughing splutter, an eruption of leaves and dust, a voice that sounds a little like mine but is not the same as it was before.

Here's a question I've gotten like 5 times this year. "I haven't read your books yet. Are they any good?" No, I only write shitty books. I love to spend a lot of time writing intricately shitty books and then being painfully truthful about the crapulous product of my shitty labor.

Perhaps, too, hesitance overtakes me because when I think of writing I glimpse the world I left behind.

bukan sekadar membaca, tetapi mempertemukan antara satu buku dengan yang lain, mempertemukan mereka dengan realitas lalu menemukan sintesis dan membuat tulisan kita sendiri.

Write something every day,' she said, 'even if it's only a line, it will protect you.

In effect, writers give us a transcript of how the brain works because they look at the images turning up in their own minds with such concentration and dedication.

Because the practice of writing is, then, a laying down of flowers upon flowers, it may be regarded as an exteriorization of what the imagining mind does, and of what it was doing long before it invented this external form of itself.

Xavier long-ago recognized the power of his looks and commanding presence and had successfully parlayed it to his advantage throughout his career and writing had been very lucrative for him. Then, he met Pilar, his #1 fanatic fan and the game changed. The shit got real.

Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages, which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.

The only wealth I'm interested in is a wealth of words.

What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life—that is what is abnormal.

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle…. Writing in my mother tongue—at that point close to extinction—I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again…. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

Melt down the fat. Cut the cosmetics and coloratura. The classic rule of good journalism: honor the verb, sacrifice the adjective.

The Indian himself must be the answer—he must learn the Scriptures, be taught, and in turn teach his own people. To this end Pete and Jim reopened the missionary school at Shandia that Dr. Tidmarsh had been forced to close. Here in a one-room schoolhouse the youngsters of the community were taught to read and write so that ultimately they could read the Scriptures for themselves.

Authors go on writing books, and so we go on reading them. It is a sad state of affairs.

Nothing helped until the day she took a tablet and pencil into the basement and moved the event out of her and onto paper, where it was reshaped into a kind of simple equation: loss equaled the need to love again, more.

Now there's some honest writing!

And so, what of it all? What of me and my passions and personas, my great loves and failures of love, my writing, my politics? What of the clanging opinions, the endless queries as to the whys and wherefores of how I chose to conduct myself? In the end, there is but one answer to every question, whether it is spit at me or made as gentlest inquiry: I was I.

A human being writes the book, but what writes for him or her is more spirit than physical being, and that spirit lives only in solitude.

welcome antidote to the speed of modern life. By their very nature, letters allow for more consideration of the words and thoughts that someone is offering you, in part because they prevent interruption.