Quotes About Writing

Hemingway said write first and then take out all the good stuff and what's left is story. (By "good stuff" Hemingway meant all the material that the author has fallen in love with—not everything that was proper for the story.)

But he was not a writer, and never would be. Try as he might, he only succeeded in putting honest words on the rack, leaving them screaming, though of this he was happily unconscious.

Sólo siendo absolutamente libre se puede bailar bien, se puede hacer bien el amor y se puede escribir bien.

los escritores escribimos mucho mejor de lo que hablamos)

La escritura es un esqueleto exógeno que te permite continuar en pie ortopédicamente cuando sin ello serías una gelatina derrotada, una masa blanda aplastada en el suelo (...).

A saber de dónde saldrá esa necesidad absoluta que nos convierte a todos los escritores en eternos indigentes de la mirada ajena.

Es un runrún creativo que te acompaña mientras conduces, cuando paseas al perro, mientras estás en la cama intentando dormir. Uno escribe todo el rato.

Yo escribo. Es mi mayor victoria, mi conquista, el don del que me siento más orgullosa; y aunque las palabras están siendo devoradas por el gran silencio, hoy constituyen mi única arma

en el oficio de novelista hay algo aún mucho más importante que ese tintineo de palabras, y es la imaginación, las ensoñaciones, esas otras vidas fantásticas y ocultas que todos tenemos.

No better stress reliever than to sit down and write! Let your imagination take you to other places and another time!

I write because I am poorly adjusted to reality. (The Writer's Kitchen)

What mattered was writing it: the act of words.

What I have learned as a writer is that people love being asked about their stories.

Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. The

do you like to write? No. No writer really likes to write. I like to make love and drink wine. At my age I shouldn't lose time with anything else, but I can't stop writing. It's a disease.

Escribir es algo más que eso, es urdir, tejer, zurcir palabras, no importa si es una receta médica o una pieza de ficción. La diferencia es que la ficción consume cuerpo y alma.

The possibility of acquiring the art of writing may be withheld from someone through poverty, or through the conditions of civilization into which he is born; but for the attainment of knowledge and proficiency in the higher worlds, there is no obstacle for those who earnestly seek them.

I am by nature a dealer in words, and words are the most powerful drug known to humanity.

Which is like writing history backward, if you ask me, fixing the past to fit the present. Hindsight made over into foresight.

Writing isn't just a job that stops at six thirty... It's a mad, sexy, sad, scary, ruthless, joyful, and utterly, utterly personal thing. There's not the writer and then me; there's just me. All of my life connects to the writing. All of it.

A book must start somewhere. One brave letter must volunteer to go first, laying itself on the line in an act of faith, from which a word takes heart and follows, drawing a sentence into its wake. From there, a paragraph amasses, and soon a page, and the book is on its way, finding a voice, calling itself into being.

Ruth was a novelist, and novelists, Oliver asserted, should have cats and books.

If you've ever tried to keep a diary, then you'll know that the problem of trying to write about the past really starts in the present: No matter how fast you write, you're always stuck in the then and you can never catch up to what's happening now ; which means that now is pretty much doomed to extinction.

My last thoughts, measured out in drops of ink.