Quotes About Writing

Becka said that writing was almost the same as that—each letter was like a picture or a row of stitching, and it was also like a musical note; you just had to learn how to form the letters, and then how to attach them together

The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong.

Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.

Anyone literate can take an implement in hand and make marks on a flat surface. Being a writer, however, seems to be a socially acknowledged role, and one that carries some sort of weight or impressive significance - we hear a capital W on Writer.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer...an almost physical nerve, the kind you need to walk a log across a river.

The written word is so much like evidence — like something that can be used against you later.

Around the age of seven I wrote a play. The protagonist was a giant; the theme was crime and punishment; the crime was lying, as befits a future novelist; the punishment was being squashed to death by the moon.  ...This play was not a raging success. As I recall, my brother and his pals came in and laughed at it, thus giving me an early experience of literary criticism.

She writes like an angel, it says of Laura on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin. An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact angels don't write much. They record sins and the names of the dammed and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: God be with you is not an unmixed blessing.

I could spell it, I say. Write it down. He hesitates at this novel idea. Possibly he doesn't remember I can. I've never held a pen or a pencil, in this room, not even to add up the scores. Women can't add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. What

She is dying because she said. She is dying for the sake of the word. It is her body, silent and fingerless, writing this poem.

Wind comes in, your candle tips over and flares up, and a loose tent-flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining in the light from your burning paper shelter, but you keep on writing anyway because what else can you do?

Az igazságot egyetlen módon lehet csak megírni: ha feltételezzük, hogy amit megírtunk, soha nem fogja elolvasni senki, Se más, se mi magunk valamikor késÅ'bb. Különben csak mentegeti magát az ember.

I write as if I've lived a lot of things I haven't lived..

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.

Women do not usually write novels of the type favoured by men but men are known to write novels of the type favoured by women. Some people find this odd.

Jack quit his advertising job and devoted himself to the life of the pen. Or rather, to the life of the Remington, soon to be replaced with an IBM Selectric, with the bouncing ball that let you change the typeface. Now that was cool!

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

It has always been my custom to treat words with respect. I can recall the time...when I knew words would be my life's work

Never trust a writer, he had warned me. All the world is ours to kidnap and transform as we will, to our own purpose.

In a weak moment I have written a book...

I still have my laptop but I haven't used it. I'm a paper man, not electronic.

I begin every novel with the vow that I will not write about technology, Catholicism, or Hell. As you know, I end up writing about all three. They just happen to be personal obsessions of mine.

Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.