Quotes About Writing

When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.

An old maid, that's what I'm to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps…

I've had a lot of troubles, so I write jolly tales.

If all literary women had such thoughtful angels for husbands, they would live longer and write more. Perhaps that wouldn't be such a blessing to the world though, as most of us write too much now,' said Mrs. Jo…

you have found your style at last. You wrote with no thoughts of fame and money, and put your heart into it

Well, the winter's gone, and I've written no books, earned no fortune, but i've made a friend worth baving and I'll try to keep him all my life.

The great novelist vibrated between two decanters with the regularity of a pendulum.

I've had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales.

I've had lots of trouble, so I write jolly tales.

you have found your style at last. You wrote with no thought of fame or money, and put your heart into it, my daughter; you have had the bitter, now comes the sweet;

eu sigo virando páginas e estragando-as, como costumava estragar meus cadernos de exercício, e faço tantos começos que nunca haverá um fim.

But having given the rein to her lively fancy, it galloped away with her at a great pace, and common sense, being rather weakened by a long course or romance writing, did not come to the rescue.

I had had lots of troubles; so I write jolly tales.

Slow writing is a meditative act: slowing down to understand our relationship to our writing, slowing down to determine our authentic subjects, slowing down to write complex works, slowing down to study our literary antecedents.

The most productive writers and creative people I know realize that dreaming and daydreaming are important parts of how writers work. We might not know, now, what to do with the images our dreams or daydreams provide, but one day, if we continue to try to unravel their meaning, as Naylor's process illustrates, we will.

The three books I wrote by hand and with a typewriter took less time than the ones I've written using a computer.

Publishers now act as if writing is the same as typing.

We push aside work that takes long—novels, poetry collections, biographies, articles, memoirs—to write e-mail messages that take little time while complaining we have no time to write.

Woolf penned roughly 535 words and crossed out 73 of them, netting her 462 words for her day's work. Let's say she worked for three hours. That's about 178 words an hour including the words she deleted—and Woolf was writing at the height of her creative powers.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

What I'm trying to say is that a certain sentence of the book—a written sentence, a very powerful sentence—killed Flora.' Louise was silent. After a few moments she spoke. 'I wish I could write a sentence like that.

Her father was slowly dying of stomach cancer while she was writing her series, and this might have further embittered her toward Rockefeller

Yet just as the sailors were active on the ship (though the wind, not the sailors, ultimately controlled the ship's movement), so the human authors were active in writing as the Spirit directed.