Quotes About Writing

Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you've already written to generate new material.

Robert Frost said, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called "the unsayable said." If

There's a great feeling of relief and catharsis when you manage to get something that's been buried or hidden out onto the page. And such a process, whether or not it eventually results in a poem, helps to integrate that part of the self.

Writing is always a process of discovery - I never know the end,or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There is a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

No one cares about books, that's why you can write anything you want in them.

If you want to write a novel about our world now, you'd better write science fiction, or you will be doing some kind of inadvertent nostalgia piece; you will lack depth, miss the point, and remain confused.

texts are written for people to read later.

A nadie le importan los libros, por eso puedes escribir lo que te dé la gana en ellos. A la gente le importan las normas.

Exergasia' means 'use of different phrases to express the same idea,' 'synathroesmus' means 'accumulation by enumeration,' and 'incrementum' means 'piling up points to make an argument.' So listing them does all three, yes?

Like what? Mary asked. Issued for what? For not burning carbon. Started writing on the whiteboard, feeling she was oriented enough to be ready for some figures. Not equations, which might just as well be Sanskrit to her, only some numbers.

To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as non-existent or in some way beneath consideration.

John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?

But to me, writing books is a way to earn a living in my pajamas.

The writer must be able to revel and roll in the abundance of words; he must know not only the direct but also the secret power of a word. There are overtones and undertones to a word, and lateral echoes, too.

During those days, both the bed and my little rickety table were swimming in notes and scribbled-over manuscripts that I took turns working on, adding new ideas that occurred to me in the course of the day, crossing out material or freshening up the dead passages with a lively word here or there, and pushing on from sentence to sentence with great labor.

Jeg har aldri i mitt liv skrevet slibrig; men jeg kunne gi anvisning på dristigere ting i mine bøker enn hva som stod i den tyske fortelling. De er å finne f.eks. både i Sult og Pan. Men når Jacob Sverdrup leser over igjen disse steder og forarges, så vil jeg også be ham lese f.eks. Ibsens Lille Eyolf påny. Den lille nydelige, senile råhet, champagnen som ei ble rørt, bør han virkelig nippe til. Og huske. Og bruke.

I de siste Dager har jeg tænkt og tænkt paa Nordlandssommerens evige Dag. Jeg sitter her og tænker paa den og paa en Hytte som jeg bodde i og paa Skogen bak Hytten og jeg gir mig til at skrive noget ned for at forkorte Tiden og for min Fornøielses Skyld.

Jeg har en bog i Hovedet, men den vil ikke ud, den Satan.

Her vedlægges nu et par dusing skille-tegn som du selv må sitte til hist og her i brevet!

I found a bench to myself and began chewing savagely at my lunch. It did me good; it had been a long time since I'd had such a well-balanced meal and I gradually became aware of the same feeling of tired peace which one feels after a long cry. My courage had now returned; it was not enough any longer to write an essay on something so elementary and simple-minded as "Crimes of the Future," which any ass could arrive at, let alone read in history books.

Jeg vilde bare vise, hvilken Højde, man kunde drive det til med Ord, derfor ble disse Stumper bare Ord, pene Ord, Klingeling.

St. Hans 1948. I dag har Høyesterett dømt, og jeg ender min skrivning.

I don't think there is any point in continuing writing. Since I have neither killed nor been killed, there's nothing further to explain. (Box Man, p. 38)