Quotes About Writing

I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.

Oh that my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book!

The sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond.

He [Solomon] spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a thousand and five.

hackneyed phrases…. The purpose with which these phrases are introduced is for the most part that of giving a fillip to a passage that might be humdrum without them… but their true use when they come into the writer's mind is as danger signals; he should take warning that when they suggest themselves it is because what he is writing is bad stuff, or it would not need such help; let him see to the substance of his cake instead of decorating with sugarplums.

You provide the prose poems, I'll provide the war.

At least my pencil never crashes!

Some authors should be paid by the quantity NOT written.

Au clair de la lune,Mon ami Pierrot,Prête-moi ta plumePour écrire un mot.

Lá fazê-lo soube-te bem não soube? e não me soube bem fazê-lo, sabe-me bem o pó, sabia-me bem que a minha mamã, nem isso, sabia-me bem ser uma invenção de quem escreve não uma pessoa meu Deus, não me tornem pessoa, dêem-me sensações de papel, sofrimentos de papel, remorsos de papel que a gente rasga e desfaz

escrever é um bocado fazer respiração boca-a-boca ao dicionário de Moraes, à gramática da 4ª classe e aos restantes jazigos de palavras defuntas

Ca s? scrii, nu trebuie s? fii inteligent. Tre­buie s? fii un idiot sclipitor.

Écrire est un plaisir et une corvée.

Viver é como escrever sem corrigir.

Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.

And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.

to write a story is to inch backward and forward along a series of planks you are cantilevering out into the darkness, plank by plank, inch by inch, and the best you can hope is that each day you find yourself a little bit farther out over the abyss.

If only she had brought her novel down with her.

Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.

He translates one book of the Iliad, two of the Odyssey, plus an admirable slice of Plato's Republic. Five lines on an average day, ten on a good one, scribbled onto yellow legal pads in his crimped pencil-writing and stuffed into boxes beneath the dining table. Sometimes he believes his translations are adequate. Usually he decides they're terrible. He shows them to no one.

As I work on yet another draft of my story, I try to remember these lessons. A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world. But a story—a finished piece of writing—is for its reader; it should help its reader refine, perceive, and process the world—the one particular world of the story, which

Aethon doesn't read to the end of the book?" "That's how he writes his story on the tablets," says Rachel. "How they get buried in the tomb with him. Because he doesn't stay in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He chooses… What's the word, Mr. Ninis?

All morning I lay down sentences, erase them, and try new ones. Soon enough, when things go well, the world around me dwindles: the sky out the window, the furious calm of the big umbrella pine ten feet away, the smell of dust falling onto the hot bulb in the lamp. That's the miracle of writing, the place you try to find--when the room, your body, and even time itself cooperate in a vanishing act.

For most people bedtime was early, although Cicero admitted to writing speeches or books and reading papers at night (there was a Latin word for it, lucubrare—to work by lamplight).