Quotes About Writing

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.

As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe.

Mr. Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world. Nevertheless, like all fervid writing, the task was done in less time than usual, and if the spelling differed from Mrs. Glegg's,- why, she belonged, like himself, to a generation with whom spelling was a matter of private judgment.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Mr. Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world. Nevertheless, like all fervid writing, the task was done in less time than usual, and if the spelling differed from Mrs. Glegg's,–why, she belonged, like himself, to a generation with whom spelling was a matter of private judgment.

You can get yourself pretty thoroughly lost, in time and space, if you don't know where you are or where you have just come from. How is this relevant to creative writing and writing programs? First of all, there is a certain amount of misinformation masquerading as assumed history -- as the story of creative writing in America.

Ancient writers sometimes meant what they said and occasionally even knew what they were talking about.

Women are more complicated communicators than men, who have a tendency to pronounce and bloviate, and that makes for better writing in talky work.

I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.

Half your battle is won when the writing is good, and then you as an artist bring your personality into it.

I do remember dancing in my living room when my short story 'The Laughing Man Meets Little Cat' won a Chizine fiction contest in 2002.

In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.

Party of Five won a Golden Globe, it was a well-written television series.

My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.

I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

I wrote my first short story for a competition and won second prize. Another competition came up and I won first prize. The first story was published in a newspaper. The second went out on radio.

Creating the characters is the most creative part of the novel except for the language itself. There I am, sitting in front of my computer in right-brain mode, typing the things that come to mind - which become the seeds of plot. It's scary, though, because I always wonder: Is it going to be there this time?

I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

I'm not over-enamored of complicated books, and wonder if it's more for the author's ego than anything else?