Quotes About Writing

Write to save yourself ... and someday you'll write because you've been saved. You will feel terrible shame for this. Let your humility grow larger than your shame.

Write to save yourself,' Athos said, 'and someday you'll write because you've been saved.'" - from Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being concious of living.

You can't just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else's appreciation.

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh (War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh 1939-1944)

There is, of course, always the personal satisfaction of writing down one's own experiences so they may be saved, caught and pinned under glass, hoarded against the winter of forgetfulness. Time has been cheated a little, at least, in one's own life, and a personal, trivial immortality of an old self assured.

There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?

In our family, an experience was not finished, not truly experienced, unless written down...

If I haven't put that on a T-shirt, I'm going to. Actually, I really don't want to write anything that can't be put on a T-shirt. Actually I'd like to write only on T-shirts. Actually, I'd like to write whole novels on T-shirts. So you guys could say, 'I'm wearing chapter 8 of Lestat's new book, that's my favorite; oh I see you're wearing chapter 6-

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. Only if you do that can you hope to make the reader feel every particle of what you, the writer, have known and feel compelled to share.---Forward to Kafka's Short stories

I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Yes. To write a novel is to risk my sanity. The deeper I get into the suffering and conflict of the characters, into the very situations and thoughts and feelings that make the novel worthwhile, the worse I feel, and the more likely I am to be severely depressed when the book is finished. There is no avoiding this: it is the result of attempting to tell all you know, to reach for the stars, to write what matters.

There were many markings in pencil, and those strange symbols again, dashed off, it seemed, revealing their opacity what a complex and abstract thing written language is.

You, know, the only thing I can be is a writer. I'm absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you've lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you.

I want to remember these nights always, she thought. I want to fix them forever in my memory. I want to lose nothing. When it's done, when it's decided and it's over, I will write a memoir seeking to capture everything forever. When it's happening it is too beautiful, too overwhelming, and you can feel it's being lost with every breath you take.

I wouldn't write a book to tell you that a vampire was happy.

But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless, beneath five centuries of time. I am a vampire. My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the ruined mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy.

how can you underestimate the effects of your books, your words, all of it on all the blood drinkers in existence?

I can write it myself," I said, "if only you give me the parchment and the pen. I need for you to send it, and establish this place for the receipt of an answer to it.

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't.

She was introspective when drunk, did a lot of singing and writing and dancing about during such periods, and demanded to be left alone.