Quotes About Writing

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

I think the sport of wrestling, which I became involved with at the age of 14... I competed until I was 34, kind of old for a contact sport. I coached the sport until I was 47. I think the discipline of wrestling has given me the discipline I have to write.

The building of the architecture of a novel - the craft of it - is something I never tire of.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

If you are careful,' Garp wrote, 'if you use good ingredients, and you don't take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.

In the end, we all inherit a stone, after life's waves have rolled over us—and hopefully, she'll write upon it

yes, writing is mostly a dream, but angels visit in dreams

Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.

I retain a stupid, Romantic love for pens and pads. The stuff of writing still affects me. And I've always been someone who will go to the bathroom in the middle of dinner to write down something, a word or idea, that for whatever reason had not wanted to be lost. You have to be a squirrel in that way. You have to be a chipmunk, and what you are collecting are combinations of words.

From what has been said, it is clear that a book is either inspired or not inspired whilst it is being written.

All forms of literature are dangerous; but in none is the danger more acute than in historical fiction...

Algunas historias es mejor no escribirlas. Si la escribes, entonces será real. Si solo la conservamos en nuestros recuerdos es como si nunca hubiera pasado, como si sólo hubiera sido un sueño o una alucinación propia de chalados. Nadie cree lo que decimos, pero si lo escribes eso le dará, no sé, cierto fundamento. Lo volverá real.

Mi escritura era muy apretada, como nerviosa. Las palabras discurrían en líneas titubeantes. como un campo de trigo recorrido por un soplo de viento.

When I have fears that I may cease to beBefore my pen has glean'd my teeming brain.

I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of—I am however young writing at random—straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness—without knowing the bearing of any one assertion of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?

When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occassional cheese dip.

One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.

I've been writing about measurement a lot this year, because I've found that measuring progress is the only way to drive lasting success.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie, in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting, they're dressing the scene, they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.

Everybody is forever saying that the essay is dead. This is always said in essays.

Some lay persons of higher status were also apparently literate, at least in Icelandic, but all writing, whether in the international language of the church or in the vernacular, was the result of the conversion to Christianity, which brought with it the technology of manuscript writing.

My pen.' Funny, I wrote that without noticing. 'The torch', 'the paper', but 'my pen'. That shows what writing means to me, I guess. My pen is a pipe from my heart to the paper. It's about the most important thing I own.