Quotes About Writing

Strunk & White

The American Heritage Dictionary definition says a metaphor is "an implicit comparison." This unusual term is used for one reason, and one reason only: to distinguish it from a simile, which makes an explicit—or direct—comparison.

There's nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.

Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.

Anybody who writes a book is an optimist. First of all, they think they're going to finish it. Second, they think somebody's going to publish it. Third, they think somebody's going to read it. Fourth, they think somebody's going to like it. How optimistic is that?

Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.

Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don't consider that.

She is about to add, I have scars, inside me, but she stops herself. What is a scar, Oh Toby? That would be the next question. Then she'd have to explain what a scar is. A scar is like writing on your body. It tells about something that once happened to you, such as a cut on your skin where blood came out.

Some people write letters, in the library.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date.

Why hyphenate, why parenthesize, unless absolutely necessary?

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

Not for nothing do we at Ardua Hall say 'Pen Is Envy.'

Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

I must admit it's a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn't: I'm saying nothing, you're hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.

How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. Impossible, of course.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.

Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.