Quotes About Writing

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.

Every skillful writer foregrounds notable aspects of experience, details that might otherwise be lost in the mass of data that continuously bathes our senses - and in so doing prompts us to find and savour those in the world around us.

The only way to defend language is to attack it....' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers.

conversation allows us little room to revise our original utterances, which ill suits our tendency not to know what we are trying to say until we have had at least one go at saying it...whereas writing.... is largely made up of rewriting, during which original thoughts- bare inarticulate strands- are enriched and nuanced over time...appear on a page according to the logic and aesthetic order they demand

A slightly more conscious awareness of writing as compensation may lend us energy to acknowledge our unrequited ache for more visceral forms of contact.

Even if we find literature the finest of substitutes, infinitely better than anything else yet invented, it still pays to recognise that substitute is what it might primarily be, that writing is in certain ways an act of very polite and artful revenge on a world too busy to listen and that we would never develop such fierce bookish ambitions if we had not first been let down by those we needed so much to rely upon.

Des mots tordus, des mots décousus, des mots sans queue ni tête, j'écrirais comme les mots me viendraient, je commencerais maladroitement et je finirais maladroitement comme j'avais commencé, je m'en foutrais de la raison pure, de la méthode, de la phonétique, de la prose (...), ça serait alors l'écriture ou la vie. [Verre Cassé, p. 198]

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers. Scripps: No. Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.

But what is it all about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don't. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all.

To her, though, nothing could have been more serious, and she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad', and if you're planning on writing that's probably a good thing. But if you are planning on writing and they haven't fucked you up, well, you've got nothing to go on, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.

She was discrete about writing in her notebooks … This too pointed to potential derangement. What had her majesty to note down? She never used to do it. And like any change in behavior of the elderly, it was readily put down to decay. Probably Alzheimer's.

She found that after she had written something down, she was happy. Happy as if she had been reading. And it came to her again that did not want to simply be a reader. A reader was next door to being a spectator where as when she was writing she was doing. And doing was her duty.

You don't put your life into your books. You find it there.

Larkin says that they fuck you up, your mum and dad. And if you end up writing, then that's fine because if they have, then you've got something to write about. But if they haven't fucked you up, you don't have anything to write about, so then they've fucked you up good and proper.

If reading softens one up, writing does the reverse. You have to be tough, do you not?

Kyetäkseen kirjoittamaan ihmisen on oltava sitkeä.

3 August, Yorkshire. I know so little that writing is like crossing a patch of swampy ground, jumping from one tussock to another trying not to get my feet wet (or egg on my face). Of course at a distance no one can see the ground is swampy, and at a distance too one's movements are smoothed out, the hesitations diminished. Fifty years on, the anguished leaps may seem like confident strides. Except who will be looking?

I suppose everyone gets written about sooner or later.

And since he's written 126 novels and counting, I think that we can safely say Mr. Foster is one hell of an entertainer.

I should have written books instead of reading them.

T]he truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.