Quotes About Writing

How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.

Jackson of course knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn't just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books already in existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school. A Tale of Two Cities and Huckleberry Finn, each of them with language that wore you down though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past.

Escribir es duro, pero cuánto más escribes, y cuánto más disfrutas lo que escribes, mejor se vuelve.

going out to the she'd

I was motivated to write about violence because I believe it's not unusual. I see it as just a part of life, and I think we get in trouble when we separate people who've experienced it from those who haven't.

A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God reads letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me. (Walker 2000: 110)

In that story I gathered up the historical and psychological threads of the life my ancestors lived, and in the writing of it I felt joy and strength and my own continuity. I had that wonderful feeling writers get sometimes, not very often, of being with a great many people, ancient spirits, all very happy to see me consulting and acknowledging them, and eager to let me know, through the joy of their presence, that, indeed, I am not alone.

Writing permits me to be more than I am. Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.

remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God will read letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me. Anyway, when I don't write to you I feel as bad as I do when I don't pray, locked up in myself and choking on my own heart. I am so lonely, Celie.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God will read letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me. Anyway, when I don't write to you I feel as bad as I do when I don't pray, locked up in myself and choking on my own heart.

Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known. Or that was the nature, I should say, until man started to put things on paper.

The God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was.

You'd be surprised how good writing matters when you're going after money.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was.

The most sturdy nouns fell to faint approximations under my pen.

You can't live and write at the same time.

This is one of my difficulties now... my fear that Mom will find this memoir about her angry. Another difficulty is the fact that the story of my mother and me is unfolding even as I write it.

Sometimes its like Nathaniel Hawthorne is trying to be deep.

I'm with you in Rockland where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.