Quotes About Writing

He is careful of what he reads, for this is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, as this is what he will know.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex and it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let it rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, It is the trade entering his body. The art must enter the body, too.

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then--and only then--it is handed to you.

I like to be aware of a book as a piece of writing, and aware of its structure as a product of mind, and yet I want to be able to see the represented world through it. I admire artists who succeed in dividing my attention more or less evenly between the world of their books and the art of their books . . . so that a reader may study the work with pleasure as well as the world that it describes.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better. This tender relationship can change in a twinkling. If you skip a visit or two, a work in progress will turn on you.

You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

One of the few things I know about writing is this:spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, 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 impulse to save something good for a better place later is a signal to spend it now. Something more will arise later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer--such as it is--is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world. This explains why so many books describe the author's childhood. A writer's childhood may well have been the occasion of his only firsthand experience.

Why, why in the blue-green world write this sort of thing? Funny written culture, I guess; we pass things on.

You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a toolshed meant for mowers and spades.

Decade's reading had justified his guess that men and women perceive love identically save for, say, five percent. Reading books by men and women showed only-but it is something- that love struck, in exactly the same way, most, but not all, of those few men and women, since the invention of writing, who wrote something down. An unfair sample.

For me, writing's the only thing that's always real. I've never regretted a day I wrote a good scene, whatever else I screwed up that day. That's what's fucking real.

the things we write, they aren't always really us.

She would find her answers in the words she wrote, in the stories she told, not by asking for permission.

It's not always about writing more words or drinking more coffee. Sometimes getting to the end of a novel simply takes remembering that the world is more complicated than we know, and then sticking some of those complications into the story.

Moxie's wifi network is You_Suck_at_Writing, with underscores. The password's 'DearGenius,' no space. You found the note on her desk, right?

We writers always get our revenge on paper

I've always thought that science and fiction writing have a lot in common because they're both about modeling reality.

She had changed the arc of her own story, merely by typing a couple of thousand words each day for thirty days.

Novelists are evil psychopomps, basically. We treat a few characters as real, but the rest of them are cannon fodder.

You should make sure that the quotable lines of dialogue in your book never exceed a hundred and forty characters!" seemed