Quotes About Writing

I'm a full-time writer, which means I have the entire day to get my work done. But that can also be bad, because that means I have the entire day to get in my way.

I've been writing full-time since about 1984 - mostly magazine features and columns.

Writing a book is usually a full-time job that takes years. I didn't have years. So I decided to crowdsource content for the book.

I don't know if I had ever found my place in the world until I fully committed to being a writer.

I'm never going to write fart jokes, because I feel like I have a responsibility to the audience to give them good stuff. I should be able to come up with something funnier than any third-grade boy could think of.

I work with some of the funniest writers in the country.

The funniest book I've ever had read to me is 'I, Partridge.' It's a brilliantly written book, but it's the greatest audiobook there has ever been.

There's no such thing as a 'writing talent.' Anyone can be taught to write a good sentence. What writers are born with is a 'third ear,' not for words but for human nature. And like people with an ear for music who can play the piano without lessons or notes, we can't explain how we know what we know — we just know.

You may ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnesses for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

Un estilo interesante consiste en una sucesión constante de diminutas, casi indetectables, sorpresas en el texto

Il vaut mieux écrire du rire que des larmes, Parce que le rire est le propre de l'homme. VIVEZ JOYEUX.

I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.

You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown of book writing.

Now I find the stack of chapters I called Under Magnolia. Why, after many years, even open these flowered folders? Dare alla luce, the Tuscans say at the birth of a baby, to give to the light.

Egy kínai költÅ' sok száz évvel ezelÅ'tt azt mondta, hogy ha valamit leírunk, újra át is éljük.

L.A. kills people.' Jacaranda said. 'You're lucky you're leaving. You'll be able to write.' She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn't even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.

I said I was an English major, that I wanted to write someday, that I read the way other people ate chocolate.

You'll have to take me to some museums," he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men's rooms across the country.

Writing was my religion, my foremost purpose in life, my consolation. But as the years passed and I didn't have the successes that others deemed the qualifications of a "real" writer, I went into hiding. I wrote, but I lost the strength of my words. I wrote, but with a doubt that needled each sentence, a lack of self-confidence that clouded my imagination. My boldness evaporated. My verve started to become a distant memory. I lost my truth.

She used to write all the time,' Elizabeth explained, 'before she lost all that weight. Remember? When she was the butt of everyone's jokes instead of the girl all the boys want to date?

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations.

good writing should be grasped at once—in a second.

You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written.

Because the diary was not written in retrospect, it contains the trembling life of every moment.