Quotes About Writing

Ogial picked up a note and twiddled it in his fingers in Penric's direction.  Penric took it gingerly.  The crisp writing didn't add much to the archdivine's precis, beyond the nameless patient's guessed age, early twenties, and coloration—caramel skin, curly dark hair, brown eyes—which described half the folk in Adria.  The reported drooling, thrashing, and broken speech could denote, well, any number of conditions.

Lest any idle person might think that I have had time to write plays during the last few years I may mention that the first act of The Tents of the Arabs was written on September 3rd, and the second act on September 8th, 1910. The first and second acts of The Laughter of the Gods were written on January 29th, and the third act on February 2nd and 3rd, 1911. A Night at an Inn was written on January 17th, 1912, and The Queen's Enemies on April 19, 20, 21, 24, 28, 29, 1913.

Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they can make you thin

The proper relationship of a writer to his or her own life is similar to a cook with a cupboard. What the cook takes from the cupboard is not the same thing as what is in the cupboard.

From here on in, many things can happen. But the main one will be this: you decide not to go to law school after all, and, instead, you spend a good, big chunk of your adult life telling people how you decided not to go to law school after all. Somehow you end up writing again.

If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning to Write.

In so many things I loved I was sadly insufficiently gifted and driven. But writing I could plod along with -- and no one discouraged me. People were much kinder. I headed toward the kindness.

There was the usual dreaminess, I suppose. Also a shyness that caused me—and others—to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset to a literary life. Not being fluent on one's feet sends one to the page and a habit is born.

The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius.

There are six more paragraphs. You read the whole thing out loud in class. No one likes it. They say your sense of plot is outrageous and incompetent. After class someone asks you if you are crazy.

She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them — she didn't trust things written in the morning only — so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day — its moods, its light — was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.

The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.

Before he wrote about them, said Quilty, pretending to read the guidebook out loud, Hemingway shot his characters. It was considered an unusual but not unheard-of creative method. Still, even within literary circles, it is not that widely discussed.

Indeed, I find that distance lends perspective and I often write better of a place when I am some distance from it. One can be so overwhelmed by the forest as to miss seeing the trees.

If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.

A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

What few realize is that no writer is free to write exactly as he might wish. He is guided, to a great extent, by the tastes of readers and by the choices of editors. Of course, one can write whatever one wishes, but unless it conforms to the tastes of the public at the time, it will stay right on the author's shelf.

I like them all. There's bits and pieces of books that I think are good. I never rework a book. I'd rather use what I've learned on the next one, and make it a little bit better. The worst of it is that I'm no longer a kid and I'm just now getting to be a good writer. Just now.

My greatest complaint with present-day sexual writing is that nobody seems to be having any fun. Sex is an ordeal, or it is rape, or an athletic endeavor. Only the French find it amusing--as it certainly is. Many of those who choose it for subject matter linger on the most unpleasant aspects or treat it like a discovery. Actually, they needn't. It's been here all the time.

was lonely. I had to talk…to write to somebody, and there was no one." "There was. There was me.

Some men are gifted to paint, some to write, and some to lead men. For me it was always to e this, not to kill men, although in the years to come I was to kill more than I liked, but to command such situations as this.

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.

I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous, that would suit me, so that is my favorite dream.