Quotes About Writing

There's this guy called Joshua and he knows all about me. I hope he writes my biography, and puts spaceships in it

Outside, the sun was shining. It was irrelevant. There was something Lise had to write down, again. What was it? I am a ( ) person.

If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...

I won't read this after I've written it, any kind of past life pains me now

It isn't a good price, that you pay for writing a poem.

I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.

Does "anal-retentive" have a hyphen?

The writer's business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.

Alison Goodman

There is another possibly apocryphal story about the philosopher Jerry Fodor (he's the Yogi Berra of philosophy). Someone asked what his stream of consciousness was like as he wrote philosophy. His reply was that it mostly said, "Come on, Jerry, you can do it, Jerry, keep going, Jerry.

Lucia began to write with the new pen on a green suitcase afternoons after tea hour during the loneliest hours in an institution of the type of Barnaderg Bay, between tea and bed—the dark and gloomy, often wet hours of the day for half the year, and the poignantly light and melancholy, also often wet hours of the day during the second half of the year.

you can't write well with only the nice parts of your character, and only about nice things. And I don't want even to try anymore. I want to use everything, including hate and envy and lust and fear.

No entiendo por qué te empeñas en seguir escribiendo —me dijo una vez que estaba especialmente deprimida —. Da la impresión de que hacerlo te causa un enorme malestar.

Clara Winter," he said. "You are a word person and don't ever forget it." He was right. He knew. He could tell. It's something that can be sensed. There's a difference between word-people and non-word-people.

Over me green branches hang A blackbird leads the loud song; Above my penlined booklet I hear a fluting bird-throng. The cuckoo pipes a clear call Its dun cloak hid in deep dell; Praise to God for this goodness That in woodland I write well.

The practical politics of all the philosophers, no matter how-great their theoretical differences, were the same. They practiced an art of writing that appealed to the prevailing moral taste of the regime in which they found themselves, but which could lead some astute readers outside of it to the Elysian Fields where the philosophers meet to talk.

The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.

Don't get it right, get it written.

If you really want to be a writer, nobody can stop you -- and if you don't, nobody can help you.

Inés y la alegría es una obra de ficción inserta en la crónica de un acontecimiento histórico real. Para afrontar su escritura, un formato nuevo para mí, he mantenido ciertas lealtades y me he tomado ciertas libertades.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being cheated.

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

Yeah, the strange thing is, Ms. Topper, I never liked writing before. But now I notice I feel a lot better after I do it.

If I knew what I was thinking [...] I would never have become a writer.