Quotes About Writing

For me to read a book is still And always will be quite a thrill. For me to read a book is like A boy when he rides his new two wheel bike. And when a bird comes north in spring It's natural for her to sing. I like to read books of poems and history Books of fiction and of mystery. And what is more, I'll read until I'm grown And then I'll write books of my own.

Sumerian scribes invented the practice of writing in cuneiform on clay tablets sometime around 3400 B.C. in the Uruk/Warka region in the south of ancient Iraq. [The etymology of 'Iraq' may come from this region, biblical Erech. Medieval Arabic sources used the name 'Iraq' as a geographical term for the area in the south and center of the modern republic.]

A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.

The jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

I am often asked why I write, and I don't know really--I just want to.

One can lose a good idea by not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asides it knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiations are terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and does recognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.

As I sit looking out of a window of the buildingI wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.

It's important to try to write when you are in the wrong mood or when the weather is wrong.

I think my poems mean what they say, and whatever might be implicit within a particular passage, but there is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing.

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.

I am often asked why I write, and I don't know really—I just like it." —John Ashbery

I started to write when I was 11 or 12, doing bad imitations of Joyce. There were always white blossoms falling into the grave at the end of every story.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

The Snow Leopard's Tale is mesmeric. Tom McIntyre has compressed so many things into so few pages that I can think of only a few other short books that can compare. It was worth the wait for all of us who look forward to reading anything with his name under the title.

The house of fiction has many windows ... sometimes such a simple thing as suggesting to a student that perhaps realism instead of fantasy may be a more sympathetic genre, or humor instead of the opposite, or the novel rather than the short story--sometimes a simple suggestion like that can be the one that makes things click.

I admire writers who can make complicated things simple, but my own talent has been to make simple things complicated.

Those rituals of getting ready to write produce a kind of trance state.

Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end—as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary.

I have never thought of writing as a profession. It is a solitary independent activity in which practice can never bestow seniority.

Lace is a kind of white writing which you can only read when there's skin behind it.

The only happy people in the world are those who do not have to write long poems

To be shockingly original with your first novel, you don't have to discover a new technique: Simply write about people as they are and not as the predominantly liberal and humanist literary establishment believes that they ought to be.

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.