Quotes About Writing

I never can understand how two men can write a book together. To me, that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

You used to be entertaining before you started to write.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter - as indissolubly as if they were conceived together…. - The Crack-Up

Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.

Try fiction, suggested Tom. Trouble is I get distracted when I start to write stories - get afraid I'm doing it instead of living -

Writing for nobody? Impossible. You fumble, you stop. I don't even take the trouble of expressing myself so that when I reread myself I can understand whatever it was I was trying to say. Gilles will figure it out, he'll work it through.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter--as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

What are you going to do? Can't say - run for president, write - Greenwich Village? Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

I want to write something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned. As usual, F. Scott Fitzgerald

In fact to write (This Side of Paradise) took three months; to conceive it-- three minutes; to collect the data in it-- all my life.

If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones. 

The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed—the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

Art isn't meaningless. - It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so. - In other words, Dick, you're playing before a grandstand peopled with ghosts. - Give a good show anyhow. - On the contrary, I'd feel, it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless. Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want everyone to accept that sophistic rot?

I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same, except that a writer usually smelled of cocktails and came more often to meals.

I doubt if, after all, I'll ever write anything again worth putting in print.

AMORY WRITES A POEM

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.