Quotes About Writing

I have tried to write by the old rule that how good a book is should be judged by the man who writes it by the excellence of the material that he eliminates.

In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in.

Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.

The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not. On the question you raised, the effects of wounds vary greatly. Simple wounds which do not break bone are of little account. They sometimes give confidence. Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else.-Interview for the Paris Review, 1956

But it is death nevertheless, one of the subjects that a man may write of.

Some say that in writing you can never possess anything until you have given it away or, if you are in a hurry, you may have to throw it away.

Amit az ember leírt, az többé nem sanyargatja.

If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

Yes Tatie, and you and Chink always talking about how to make things true, writing them, and put them rightly and not describe. I remember everything. Sometimes he was right and sometimes you were right. I remember the lights and textures and the shapes you argued about.

Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.

Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan. I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings.

I have tried simply to write the best I can; sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Show irony and pity.

But, in yourself, you said that you would write about these people ... and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of. But he would never do it, because each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all.

Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

Tal vez, lejos de París, podría escribir sobre París tal como en París era capaz de escribir sobre Michigan.

We all ought to make sacrifices for literature.

Writing. It is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.

write. There was going to be everything that a man needed to write except to be alone. Zelda