Quotes About Writing

Of all the art forms that my family dabbles in, writing suits my temperament the most.

I've never experienced writer's block. When it's going really well, my body temperature goes up, and I'm flushed. I get quite delirious.

Writers seem mesmerized by the state - the temporal entity. The word 'perestroika' is impressed somehow on our minds. But that is not the duty of a writer.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations.

These matters having been arranged, I had a temporary awning erected near the river, and was for three or four days busily employed writing an account of our journey for the Governor's information.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!

edging his way closer to the writing of a novel in which he would remind his readers that telegrams and railways weren't the only ways in which they were all connected.

Rinaldo wrote me a deathly song there, and keen was the stylus.

We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.

It has been often said that writing is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration. In my experience, this is true. But, in my opinion, it is useless without that 1 percent. It's like an engine without fuel -- can't get anywhere without it. Or like a lighthouse without a light on top -- doesn't guide anyone in to home or safe harbor.

Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose-unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

No one pretends that Shakespeare was (divinely) inspired, and yet all the writers of the books of the Old Testament put together, could not have produced Hamlet.

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

You are not writing properly unless someone is bleeding, probably you.

Ridiculous," he said breathlessly. "You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing.

Like most writers, I tend to find out what I feel on a subject by writing about it. It is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it.

Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.

Hard to remember these days that there was a time you had to wait for the ink and paper reviews to see your work excoriated. With the invention of the internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michiko Kakutani.