Quotes About Writing

Indeed, we believe everyone has a book in them - a book, not a symphony, and not even a poem. What is it, this book everyone has in them? It is, perhaps, that haunting entity, the 'true' self. The true self seeks release, not constraint.

the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living.

Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct itand live in it afterwards.

The rules of writing are mostly indistinguishable from the rules of living, but this tends to be the last place people look when searching for 'there'.

Tudo que sabe é que não se reconhece mais nesses contos, embora recorde a sensação explosiva de escrevê-los, algo dentro dele se adensando e fazendo uma força irresistível para nascer. Nunca mais teve essa sensação; chega a pensar que, para continuar escritor, teria de se tornar escritor novamente, quando poderia com a mesma facilidade se tornar astronauta ou fazendeiro.

asked him what it was he was writing, and his smile widened. He said, I am writing about my childhood. I was so happy as a child, he continued, and I realised a little while ago that there was nothing I wanted so much as to recall it piece by piece, with every possible detail.

And if there's one thing I know it's that writing comes out of tension, tension between what's inside and what's outside.

E se tem uma coisa que eu sei é que essa escrita vem da tensão, uma tensão entre o que está dentro e o que está fora.

A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn't buy your way into it.

I have often looked at photographs of writers in their elegant book-lined studies and marvelled at what seems to me a mirage of sorts, the near-perfect alignment of seeming with being, the convincing illusion of mental processes on public display, as though writing a book were not the work of someone capable of all the shame and deviousness and cold-heartedness in the world.

his whole life, as far as she could see, consisted of writerly sinecures and engagements, like a whole life of eating only desserts. She wasn't sure it was healthy.

Er wisse nicht, das wolle er an dieser Stelle betonen, ob er jemals wieder ein Buch schreiben werde; sein Verhältnis zur Welt sei unzureichend dynamisch.

At home she generally avoided doing housework, she went on, because those kinds of chores made her feel so unimportant that she wouldn't have been able to write anything afterwards. She supposed they made her feel like an ordinary woman, when most of the time she didn't think about being a woman, or perhaps didn't even believe she was one, because at home it wasn't a subject that came up.

Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal's fur: the deeper they're buried the better.

When I think of my child I am seized by the desire to make good all my former powerlessness, to love as I would like to be loved: mercifully, completely, unambiguously. Her experience of this love is for the moment rather shady and unclear. I want to write it down and put it in a drawer for her, like the title deeds to something, so that she will have some proof, some inheritance, should something happen to me before I get a chance to explain it to her.

Some people write simply because they don't know how to live in the moment and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.

That's writing for you: when you make space for passion, it doesn't turn up.

To become more creative is to allow yourself the opportunity to become a playful, joyous child, to be courageous and not afraid to let go, and fun with your writing. By allowing your child to come out and play when you first begin to write, you'll be less judgemental, constricted, and rigid about your writing, and hopefully, the words will flow.

The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.

The object is very clear in the fight against racism; you have reasons why you're opposed to it. But when you're writing a novel, you don't want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that.

We definitely did not write our own vows. We're actors - people write things for us. We're not good enough for that.

I see the world as an adventure thriller and a voyage of discovery. To me, all lives are lives of mystery and secrecy, and that's what I write about.

I come by writing dialogue fairly naturally, I've got a chatty family; I'm a bit of a voyeur, and if I'm ever in a public place, I automatically find myself listening.

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.