Quotes About Writing

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.

The act of writing... is the act of trying to understand why my opinion is what it is. And ultimately, I think that's the same experience the reader has when they pick up one of my books.

I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.

Something occurs to me. "Have you ever tried writing something from Astrid's point of view?

What poet was it who wrote there's no pain worse than the pain of a broken heart? Sentimental shit. He should have spent more time in the Emporer's prisons.

Heroin offers safety, and the illusion of immortality, but it robs you of the possibilities that make holding onto life worthwhile in the first place. And since death will take us all, addicts and never-addicts and former addicts and future addicts, writing about heroin suggests that while we are here, we ought to live, which means, alas, that we allow ourselves to age and to die.

muddled insides of his head, or perhaps his soul. He'd been writing the book for almost five years, but he'd done so in

Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

Ramsgate, Kent, in the early nineteenth century.  During the last twelve years of her life, Radcliffe suffered from a spasmodic asthma, calling for the unwearied attentions of her affectionate husband. In the hope of obtaining relief, they visited Ramsgate in the autumn of 1822. Radcliffe wrote her last piece of writing here.

And, if the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it—the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

Even now I cannot believe that I am still alive and writing this account of the emperor's death. I put my hands to my eyes, wondering if what I am relating here is not all a dream - or maybe it is not a dream: perhaps it is a delusion and I am mad, the victim of some extraordinary and monstrous hallucination. How comes it that when he is dead I am still numbered among the living?

What chutzpah, to write my life story at forty! Or a bad omen. Perhaps, having written it down, I now feel the life is done. Dora would have made me snap out of it. There are some people just the thought of whom makes us behave better. [Toller]

He went down a step and sat with his back against his sweetheart's legs. She put her notebook on his head.

Writing down your thoughts is both necessary and harmful. It leads to eccentricity, narcissism, preserves what should be let go. On the other hand, these notes intensify the inner life, which, left unexpressed, slips through your fingers. If only I could find a better kind of journal, humbler, one that would preserve the same thoughts, the same flesh of life, which is worth saving. from "In That Great River: A Notebook," Poetry . Originally Published: June 1, 2010

I don't write poetry when I wish, I write when I can't, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut.

I know that I'm doomed and I'm not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed.

I relied on what I wrote to build a bridge which could not be cut down. It was my own self in which I trusted, not seeing self as that last cell from which escape can only come too late.

The age of technology has both revived the use of writing and provided ever more reasons for its spiritual solace. Emails are letters, after all, more lasting than phone calls, even if many of them r 2 cursory 4 u.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

I'm not a writer," Merri Lee protested. "I can make notes, sure, but I can't write up something like that!" "Ruthie will help you write it." There. Problem solved. Ruthie was a teacher. She wrote sentences all the time.

Ruthie will help you write it." There. Problem solved. Ruthie was a teacher. She wrote sentences all the time. "Have

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.

All novels are, or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.