Quotes About Writing

I can write above the melee, as it were, but I don't like the forced effort. It doesn't ring the way I want it to. I get off-key.

There is a curious contradiction between those who complain that we have too many novels obsessed with the incapacity to achieve relationships and those who constantly upbraid the writers who deal exclusively with personal relationship. Men write about alienation and women about relationships. Feminine writing is often attacked as small, subjective, personal. The impotence to relate to another is the impotence to love others, and from this impotence to crime is a natural step.

I am stuck with the novel, but it is a good healthy stop; it is the minute when I choose forever one kind of writing from another. It's a desperate moment, but beyond the temporary paralysis, I feel already the joy of a good bold cutting out of the mediocre.

I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.

I write emotional algebra.

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

The reasons that drive me to write are many and the most important are the most secret, I think. Perhaps most of all this: to put something out of death's reach.

Amiel écrirait que son âme émet des rayons noirs.

I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing.

A mon goût, tout cela est trop écrit, d'un style trop précieux, trop conscient... J'écris toujours mieux et plus aisément ce que je n'ai pas porté trop longtemps en tête ; dès que ma pensée précède ma plume, c'est pour arrêter celle-ci.

I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing—even writing badly—had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.

An exile's only country is his country's literature.

We write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves.

one true thing among all these paths is the need to tap a deep vein of connection between our own uncontrollable interior preoccupations and what we're most concerned about in the world around us. We write in response to that world; we write in response to what we read and learn; and in the end we write out of our deepest selves, the live, breathing, bleeding place where the picture form, and where it all begins.

We all feel unhoused in some sense. That's part of why we write.

I listened; I wrote; I learned. I do not know why so many women trusted me enough to speak to me, but underneath anything I write one can hear the percussive sound of their heartbeats. If one has to pick one kind of pedagogy over all others, I pick listening. It breaks down prejudices and stereotypes; it widens self-imposed limits; it takes one into another's life, her hard times and, if there is any, her joy too.

I used writing to take language where women's pain was--and women's fear--and I kept excavating for the words that could bear the burden of speaking the unspeakable...

I want writers to write books as actions. I want writers to write books that can make a difference in how, and even why, people live. I want writers to write books that are worth being jailed for, worth fighting for, and should it come to that in this country, worth dying for.

we just don't have the time to go chasing after bugs that the automated tests could have found for us. We have to spend our time writing new code—and new bugs.

Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material. Robert never said anything of the sort. Boredom is essential for writers; it is the only time they get to write.

You write what you are compelled to.

What does one ever ask an author except: "How?" And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: "Beats me!

What does one ever ask an author except: How? And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: Beats me!

Boredom is essential for writers. It is the only time they get to write.