Quotes About Writing

We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.

In writing are the roots, in writing are the foundations of eloquence; by writing resources are stored up, as it were, in a sacred repository, when they may be drawn forth for sudden emergencies, or as circumstances require.

It is plagiarism when you take something out of a book and use it as your own. If you take it out of several books then it is research.

I've had a very sheltered life. What can happen to you if you stay home writing all day?

Definitely they write themselves. It's an amazing experience. It's like the characters have come alive and are sitting on my shoulder talking to me, telling me their tales.

Through myth, image and geometric proportion, Schwaller de Lubicz believed, the Egyptians were able to encapsulate in their writing and architecture the basic pattern structures of the natural universe.2

I always just wanted to be funny. I never really planned to be scary.

I started writing when I was 9 years old. I was like this weird kid who would just stay in my room, typing little funny magazines and drawing comic strips.

It's hard for children's authors to be accepted when they try to write adult books. J.K. Rowling is the exception because people are so eager to read anything by her, but it took Judy Blume three or four tries before she had a success.

People say, 'What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?' I say, they don't really need advice, they know they want to be writers, and they're gonna do it. Those people who know that they really want to do this and are cut out for it, they know it.

Note in particular that a noun denoting a group of people takes which, not who. You cannot write *the battalion who had captured the fortress because a battalion, though composed of people, is not itself a person: write the battalion which had captured the fortress.

Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.

To write is to know that you are not at home.

By remaining constrained in one's environment or country or family, one has little chance of being other than the original prescription. By leaving, one gains a perspective, a distance of both space and time, which is essential for writing about family or home, in any case.

You still cling to romantic notions about writing, that you'll be able to figure things out, that you will understand life, as if life is understandable, as if art is understandable. When has writing explained anything to you? Writing does not force coherence onto a discordant narrative.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology.

Writing one's story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

Memory is a wound, you said. And some things are released only by the act of writing. Unless I go in with my scalpel and suction to excavate, to clean, to bring into light, that wound festers, and the gangrene of decay will eat me alive.

I have my writers' neuroses but not their talents.

I like men and women who don't fit well in the dominant culture, or, as Alvar de Campos calls them, strangers in this place as in every other, accidental in life as in the woul. I like outsiders, phantoms wandering the cobwebbed halls of the doomed castle where life must be lived. David Grossman may love Israel, but he wanders its cobwebbed halls, just as his namesake Vasily wandered Russia's. To write is to know that you are not home.

I find myself very, very happy to be a weird writer.

The discipline of the writer is to learn to be still and listen to what his subject has to tell him.

My writing routine is this: 1) Have a job. I can't do shit if I don't know where the rent is coming from--I tried the thing where you just declare yourself a writer and live on unemployment/savings/the kindness of strangers but that resulted in clinical depression. (interview with Amy Guth, Bigmouth Indeed Strikes Again)