Quotes About Writing

los escritores siempre encuentran la forma de «redimirse de cualquier cosa que les haya pasado».

Whether you and Marius made up some of what was written in your books I don't know. You and comrades, the Coven of the Articulate, as you are now called, may well have a penchant for telling lies.

What does it mean to write? David, you'll never see this question repeated, because with each page I understand more and more-I see the patterns that have before eluded me, and driven me to dream rather than to live.

Great secrets I sometimes wrote in Greek rather than Latin, but even in Greek. I could not say all the I thought.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

I am think about your request in writing. You see you will get something from me. I find myself yielding to it, almost as one of our human victims yields to us, discovering perhaps as the rain continues to fall outside, as the café continues with its noisy chatter, to think that this might not be the agony I presumed-reading back over the two thousand years-but almost a pleasure, like the act of drinking blood itself.

The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning.

To my earlier self I would like to say, "Relax. The story will come in due time. Trust your characters. Let them tell you what happens next.

For me, writing was the only way out.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I would never write at all.

As much as he hated the travel, he loved the writing—the virtuous delights of organizing a disorganized country, stripping away the inessential and the second-rate, classifying all that remained in neat, terse paragraphs. He cribbed from other guidebooks, seizing small kernels of value and discarding the rest.

My family can always tell when I'm well into a novel because the meals get very crummy.

Si je devais attendre d'avoir envie, je n'écrirais jamais.

I always say that the way you write a novel is for the first 83 drafts you pretend that nobody is ever, ever going to read it.

What I do like listening to as I write is the sound of ordinary life out in the street—children playing and workmen talking.

It is no less difficult to write a sentence in a recipe than sentences in Moby Dick. So you might as well write Moby Dick.

I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book that attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place.

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, & it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination's vision, & the imagination's hearing—& the moral sense, & the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks & exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.

Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.

Writing every book, the writer must solve two problems: Can it be done? and, Can I do it? Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere.