Quotes About Writing

My advice is not to wait to be struck by an idea. If you're a writer, you sit down and damn well decide to have an idea.

Writers don't often say anything that readers don't already know, unless its a news story. A writer's greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is the best a writer can do.

The Proto-Canaanite ... seems to have employed 27 different characters. The Ugaritic alphabet from around the 14th century BCE uses 30 characters ... Phoenician had by the 12th century BCE already dropped five characters ... 22 consonantal phonemes.

before the tenth century Hebrew writing, like Phoenician, was purely consonantal, and it was halfway though the ninth century BCE, under the influence of Aramaic.

Sumerian substratum is obvious not only in the use of a cuneiform system of writing, but also in the weakness of Laryngeal and Pharyngeal consonants in Akkadian

The earliest inscriptions in Hebrew date from the tenth BCE.

Phoenician writing is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite system, and from these developed the Palaeo-Hebrew script (c. 800 BCE) and the Aramaic script (c. 700 BCE), which was adopted by Hebrew after Babylonian exile.

Archaic Hebrew ... earliest inscriptions dating as far back as the close of the second millennium BCE.

The end of the third millennium saw the arrival in the east of Amorite ... who settled west of Euphrates ... and used Akkadian in writing.

I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I...I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?

The questions that I ask myself, I think they're very much to do with reality. I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I...I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?

People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that it is a labelling that helps librarians, and people who know the kind of thing they like and don't want their prejudices to be disturbed.

Briefer is better, so learn to write tight

We write to taste life twice" Anais Nin

Fiction writing is a kind of magic. If I communicate the magic spell . . . it loses its force for me.

I hate it when people don't recognize the work of women as being universal, or having any import to the world at large, as opposed to men's work, which is generally tends to be seen as more universal - men's writing about their own experience tends to be put in a broader context.

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.

Secretly she envied those who went out and about, while she remained in the grip of her sentences.

I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you.

Edith laid down her pen. It was all very well to write up Mrs Pusey and Jennifer, but she was still left with that memory of the two women lovingly entwined as they saw her to the door to say goodnight. For there was love there, love between mother and daughter, and physical contact, and collusion about being pretty, none of which she herself had ever known.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.

The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.