Quotes About Writing

There won't be any biographies of me, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken farm do not make for exciting copy.

I write to discover what I know

I don't believe in classes where students criticize each other's manuscripts. Such criticism is generally composed in equal parts of ignorance, flattery, and spite. It's the blind leading the blind, and it can be dangerous. A teacher who tries to impose a way of writing on you can be dangerous, too.

Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction.

You may ask, why not simply call this literature Christian? Unfortunately, the word Christian is no longer reliable. It has come to mean anyone with a golden heart. And a golden heart would be a positive interference in the writing of fiction.

What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.

The thing for you to do is write something with a delayed reaction like those capsules that take an hour to melt in your stomach. In this way, it could be performed on Monday and not make them vomit until Wednesday, by which time they would not be sure who was to blame. This is the principle I operate under and I find it works very well.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not.

In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel's worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.

A perception is not a story, and no amount of sensitivity can make a story-writer out of you if you just plain don't have a gift for telling a story.

I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.

I don't recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master's degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it's perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction.

Unfortunately, to try to disconnect faith from vision is to do violence to the whole personality, and the whole personality participates in the act of writing. The tensions of being a Catholic novelist are probably never balanced for the writer until the Church becomes so much a part of his personality that he can forget about her—in the same sense that when he writes, he forgets about himself.

Flannery revealed she had been working on the novel "a year and a half and will probably be two more years finishing it." She described her writing habits in a letter dated July 13: "I must tell you how I work. I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I am doing.

You can choose what you write but you can't choose what you make live.

If I even do get to be a fine writer it will not be because I am a fine writer, but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so as far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not. The Christian writer particularly will feel that whatever his initial gift is, it comes from God; and no matter how minor a gift it is, he will not be willing to destroy it by trying to use it outside its proper limits.

Anyone who has survived childhood, has enough material to write for the last of her life.

Anyone who has survived childhood, has enough material to write for the rest of her life.

i write because i don't know what i think until i read what i say

You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Let us intoxicate ourselves with ink , since we lack the nectar of the gods

Flaubert Gustave Flaubert