Quotes About Writing

You ought to write, he told himself. Maybe you will again some time.

After all if I'm trying to write books without any extra words I might as well stick to it.

Write hard and clear about what hurts

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.

Write the best story you can and throw out all the good lines.

You ought to write a book on wines, count, I said. Mr. Barnes, answered the count, All I want out of wine is to enjoy them.

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

Nu e mare lucru s? scrii. Nu faci decât s? stai jos în faÈ›a unei maÈ™ini de scris È™i s? sângerezi.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed

Write the truest sentence you know.

the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as i would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations;

Start by writing the truest sentence you know

A writer's problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing … I rewrote the first part of A Farewell to Arms at least fifty times….The first draft of anything is shit.

Writing is too goddamned hard for me to think about a soul in teh world ... I don't think about a soul, but just try to get those goddamned characters to act right.

I hope when I die, they won't put on my tombstone, 'He wrote Miss Jane Pittman .' Put anything else, but don't put just that.

My six words of advice to writers are: Read, read, read, write, write, write.

Nothing expresses Kafka's innermost sense of self more profoundly than his lapidary definition of "writing as a form of prayer": he was a writer. Not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.

Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.

Shakespeare could do anything with words. You are not more intelligent than he--so don't try to fix his writing. Try to understand it. If the language is clumsy or contradictory--consider why? Every word was deliberately chosen. Trust me.

It is sheer hell in this house. I would have to be quite a writer to describe it properly. Anyhow, I sprang from the chaos and it is my business to pull myself out of it.

Every word born of an inner necessity - writing must never be anything else.

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.