Quotes About Writing

Every book it's the hardest part-finding the way in, finding the voice to tell the story. H

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand.

If you're like most of our readers, you're probably wondering where we get all the ideas for our books from. Well, sometimes we think them up. Other times they are based on stuff that actually happens. Like this book, for instance. It all started one morning when I got up and went down to get some breakfast.

Sometimes when I am writing, I feel as though I were not reliving the events I describe here, but rather living them. That there is no distance at all, and that I do not know how my story will end. It is an extraordinary sensation, since, of course, I know only too well how it will all end.

The creative impulse, the thing that gets deep inside me, goes from brain to the fingertips. When you're writing by hand, even when you're not consciously thinking about it, you're constructing sentences in the best way possible. And I still get the thrill of the clean pad of notepaper and the pencil all sharpened.

I tell myself your spirits were down the day you wrote. You're fine and we're fine. I hope it's true.

I don't understand how anyone can write if they don't use public transport. I earwig all the time.

You are lucky you are a writer because you will sort through this in ways other souls cannot; the bad part is you feel and see all of this in ways non-writers don't.

You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won't have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.

You wrote the scary letters!

Now, when I tell him that I love something he has written, he knows that I love it.

Does any piece of writing speak for itself? Or do we impose certain values and judgements on that text when interpreting it?

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

A man who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.

Never trust a man who writes more than he reads.

The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write.

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers.

The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.

Every author does not write for every reader

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.