Quotes About Writing

Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk writing for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don't know that they're much different from each other.

So I've started writing again. It passes the time. No, I'll be honest, it does more than that. It gets stuff out of my head and heart and puts it on paper. That doesn't mean it's no longer in my head and heart. It's still there. But once I've written about it, seems like there's more room inside me again. More room for other things.

The purpose of writing is to hold a mirror to nature, but too much today is written from small mirrors in vanity cases.

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

My only concern is that I get the sentence right and describe my world clearly and deeply.

If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral. John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. "Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce.

There's a very interesting thing that Scott Fitzgerald said [about creating characters], 'If you start with a person, you end up with a type, but if you start with a type you wind up with nothing.' You set out to discover something in your writing and it is through the attempt to discover that you reflect. If you have your mind made up about something you'll reflect nothing.

No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing.

If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.

Like all the stories I wrote at that time, it was based on an unusual atmosphere that had impressed me in real life.

The hours I had spent like that, making my fingers simper at each other. I would never write about that. It was enough I had wasted the time once. I would never waste more time by writing about it.

I understood that novels, unlike children's books, were serious and important and that, just as my parents' job was to treat patients in a hospital, so, too, was it someone's job to write novels. Every civilized country had such people. They were in some way the very mark of civilization.

Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn't just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.

What am I going to do now? Then I realized this was the perfect time to start journaling again. Because if you don't write down what happens in a day, you forget—and that day becomes a blur and that blur becomes your life.

Nothing was a natural predator of productive fiction writing like the cell phone. Ditto the laptop. As she had well learned, the laptop could destroy a day.

Like Virginia Woolf said, every woman writer needs five hundred pounds a year and a room of one's own.

Even Belinda, who could write what she knew about boats on her thumbnail and still have room for the Lord's Prayer, could tell this one was special. Buck

an interrobang is an unorthodox combination of question mark and exclamation point. How did this happen?!!!???

Anne Tyler is a goddess. I've been reading her since I was at uni and she has only gotten better.

I am ashamed of my long letters to you, but I am such a murderer of language that I have to use it all to tell anything.

Io a volte non so, quando quest'uomo è solo - chiuso al buio in una stanza, steso su un letto, uomo al mondo lui solo - io quasi non so s'io non sono, invece del suo scrittore, lui stesso.

I love and always have loved policy issues and trying to have an impact on the issues that are out there. I cherish my years in government. I have loved my participation at CNN, at Current writing teaching. Where I will go next, I will have to sort out.

That's the real mystery, isn't it? Not whether he was a common merchant or the queen's son, but how he could understand so much about human nature. And write about it in a way that still rings true, all these years later.' ". . . " 'That's Shakespeare's secret. . .