Quotes About Writing

I used to write at night. I was teaching school, and I was married, and had to do all the things that one does when one is working and has a family. But I used to write at night.

I loved reading and writing, and teaching was the most exalted profession I could imagine.

I have a teaching job that allows me to pay the rent and affords me to, frankly, write the books I want to write.

I love teaching creative writing, and I think I'm good at it, but in a different life, I could have been teaching elementary school.

I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.

I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.

Journalism is a team sport. Writing novels is golf: it's you and the ball.

I leaned toward him, hoping the corset top would do half my work for me in smoothing the matter over. "Do you remember that one scene in The Glass House? The one where O'Neill walks that waitress home?" He raised an eyebrow. "Um, I wrote that scene.

I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at Milo's over by UAB, which has the best one in the whole wide world.

I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.

If you talked about writing books, you'd never do it.

Larry McMurtry and Woody Allen, still use manual typewriters to compose their books and scripts, because computers and word processors pose too many potential distractions.

His fingers just flew over the notebook paper of their own accord. The words, just right, continued to flow from Emory, using only instinct and no thought.

I'm writing this story, not you, so shut up.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

Sound simple? My best advice is to try it. The way the human brain works, when you write down important points, your mind-body tends to keep that information in a very secure place … and best of all, you won't forget it.

Writers live for reviews. Praise keeps us motivated. Want to kick an author in the ass? Review our books.

For the first-time novelist you've got to get up at 5:30 in the morning and write until 7, make breakfast and go to work. Or, come home and work for an hour. Everybody has an hour in their day somewhere.

As a young boy, I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely, but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer, where one of the most needed qualities is patience.

The world is a translation of the divine, and its manifestation. To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and reveal its potencies

The texts we write are not visible until they are written. Like a creature coaxed from out a deep wood, the text reveals itself little by little.

La mano per scrivere vale la mano per arare.

How can you write if you can't cry?

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.