Quotes About Writing

I discovered how reading a book can make you want to write one.

Many people have a gift for language that flows when they are talking and dries up when they are confronted with the blank page

Be patient. Life will give you what you need (to write your story).

If I were like Lionel, I would write a book: Obvious Lies, Bad Advice, and Wrong Information I've Gotten from Men. A book? An encyclopedia! But in this case my friend was right.

I dropped a word from the string of negative adjectives that had trailed behind me like tin cans behind the village idiot. Unappreciated, unloved, unmarried. But no longer unpublished.

Nabokov, Heinrich von Kleist, Raymond Carver, Jane Bowles, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant—the list goes on and on. They are the teachers to whom I go, the authorities I consult, the models that still help to inspire me with the energy and courage it takes to sit down at a desk each day and resume the process of learning, anew, to write.

words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential.

She'd written a book, and I hadn't, even if her novel was worse than anything I would have written.

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.

The brief sentence can be just as effective, since what matters is not complexity or decoration but rather intelligibility, grace, and the fact that the sentence should strike us as the perfect vehicle for expressing what it aims to express; the sentence should seem ideally suited to whatever story or novel or essay it happens to appear in.

what matters is not complexity or decoration but rather intelligibility, grace, and the fact that the sentence should strike us as the perfect vehicle for expressing what it aims to express…

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Cook advised aspiring authors against waiting for inspiration, which he believed to be the last resort of the lazy writer. He himself had written two 33,000-word stories a week for months at a time. And this was precisely the schedule Gardner set for

I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted.

Most writing is collective consciousness made manifest, tinged to some degree by the author's individuality. Great writing is a specific consciousness made manifest, illuminating the world in a way that we've never seen before and that yet makes sense. 222

What you are looking for is authentication, Claude. But you're looking outside, to the system, and that's the wrong place to look. Bad music gets played every day and good music gets ignored. Everybody knows that. Forget about authentication. When it comes to writing music, all you can do is sign on for a way of life, and do the work. Do the work for its own sake.

A novel is an interminable effort. You think until you are weary. You write until you are ready to scream. You stop. You rest. But you have to get back to it. You have to pick up the threads, revive your enthusiasm, recapture the mood.

You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing.

But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.

The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.

The writing of history is largely a diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.

Looking back on it, I realize I did the right thing instinctively. You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing.