Quotes About Writing

Maybe it goes without saying that if you want to become a famous writer before you're dead, you'll have to write something. But the folks in my classes with the biggest ideas and the best publicity shots ready to grace the back covers of their best-selling novels are also usually the ones who aren't holding any paper.

I wanted to be a writer, so I became one. How? I wrote things down.

There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It's like having a new lover—even the parts you aren't crazy about have the crackling fascination of the unfamiliar.

Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful turn to God.

Writing was the solution to every problem—financial, emotional, intellectual. It had kept me company when I was a lonely child. It gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise be unlikely to venture. It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: "You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man.

I thought about how all that mattered, in all entirety, and all I wanted, and all I could see anything being worth anything for, was being a writer.

To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.

Dichter: erhältst Du den Beifall des Volkes, so frage Dich: was habe ich schlecht gemacht?! Erhält ihn auch Dein zweites Buch, so wirf die Feder fort...

Just as the social novel attains its perfection with Balzac, the Bildungsroman with Flaubert, the picaresque novel with Dickens, so the psychological novel enters the phase of its full maturity with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

I realized that writing something is different from saying it — and that love stories are built around people's idiosyncrasies.

I don't believe a committee can write a book. It can, oh, govern a country, perhaps, but I don't believe it can write a book.

Sometimes it's impossible to say certain things ... Writing is something needed by man to share experience.

It was Strindberg, or more exactly, A Dream Play, that incited me to write for the theater.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

The bad news is that in your fifties, you are still pretty wet behind the ears. But here's the good news: at age seventy-two, you still have half your work to go! Better take care of your health so you can write your best books into your eighties.

It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in.

Writing a screenplay is like writing a big puzzle, and so the hardest part, I think, is getting the story.

Writers are like eremites or anchorites - natural-born eremites or anchorites - who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place.

As a rule, anyone who can tell a good story can write one, so there really need be no mistake about his qualification; such a man will be careful not to be wearisome, and to keep his point, or his catastrophe, well in hand.

I feel really qualified to write about Australia.

As far as the adjectives that I lead with, I think a writer and a comedienne are first. I have never qualified my experience or gender or my race, although I know that's a huge component on how that is used. But I think in order for me to do my job effectively, I have to really be the best at what it is I'm doing.

I'm not qualified for anything. I've had lots of little jobs, like picking grapes and being a tax man. I can't imagine not writing, because I've done it since I was five or six. Maybe I'd work in academia. That's always what the plan was.

I went to a liberal arts college wherein grading was qualitative and we had to write our own evaluations.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.