Quotes About Writing

As I have not much time left in life, I am determined not to be a coward. I will live as earnestly as I can and feel my feelings deeply, I will rigorously reflect upon my thoughts and emotions, and try to improve myself as much as I can. I will continue to write and to study, so that when the time of my death comes, I will die beautifully, as a man in the midst of a supreme and noble effort.

The eternal now," he said. "She wanted to catch it, remember? To pin it down. That was the point." "Of writing?" "Or suicide.

I've always though of writing as the opposite of suicide, she said. That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it. Like Scheherazade? Yes, she said. Spinning tales to forestall her execution...

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. A book must start somewhere, and this one starts here.

I've always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide,' she said. 'That writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it.

borrow them with no intention of returning them. But, Benjamin says, "Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

Pencils have stories inside them, and they're safe as long as you don't stick the point in your ear.

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit.30 And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all the millions of people in their lonely little rooms, furiously writing and posting to their lonely little pages that nobody has time to read because they're all so busy writing and posting,31 it kind of broke my heart.

Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.

Experience soon taught me never to write about anything important to me - the M?oris, animals, the unemployed men, the empty boarded-up houses that frightened me. The subsequent trampling of my sensibilities would have destroyed me. Soon everything I wrote came only from my imagination.

book, banging in the full stops until it looked as if he would break his pen.

He writes because for him doing so is a luxury, the more agreeable and conspicuous the fewer who but and read what he writes.

And one thing the author must not forget: his purpose.

He writes because for him it is a luxury which becomes the more agreeable and more evident, the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes.

If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I've written, I feel the day hasn't been totally wasted.

My horizon's have shrunk and I have only endings to write.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

Until you know who you are you can't write.

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

When he resigned his boss thought he was asking for more money. 'No,' he said. 'I'm just going to try to be a full-time writer.' Oh, his boss said, you want a lot more money. 'No, really,' he said. 'This isn't a negotiation. I'm just giving you my thirty days' notice. Thirty-one days from now, I won't be coming in.' Hmm, his boss replied. I don't think we can give you as much money as that .

Is it possible to be jealous of written words?

He was already beginning to understand that what was wrong with his writing was that there was something wrong, something misconceived, about him. If he hadn't become the writer he thought he had it in him to be, it was because he didn't know who he was. And slowly, from his ignominious place at the bottom of the literary barrel, he began to understand who that person might be. He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began.

Writers shouldn't have lives that are interesting. It gets in the way of your work. —Interview on Bravo Channel, Feb. 14, 1991

Voltaire had once said that it was a good idea for a writer to live near an international frontier so that, if he angered powerful men, he could skip across the border and be safe. Voltaire