Quotes About Writing

Realism can break a writer's heart.

I still had to invent and write a great philosophic work, which I had begun a year before, and which was called, "The Tower of Babel." I had already written five hundred pages of it, and I was still only on the Prologue! At this period my sexual anxiety disappeared almost completely, and the philosophic theories of my book took up all the room in my psychic activity.

Circumstances are the seeds of literature.

El carácter sucesivo de la escritura se aviene mal al discurso casi siempre instantáneo o simultáneo de la vida.

When you consider all the writers who never even had a machine. Who would have given an eyeball for a good typewriter. Any typewriter. All the ones who wrote on a matchbook covers. Paper bags. Toilet paper. Who had their writing destroyed by their jailers. Who persisted beyond all odds.

You don't have to take it out on my typewrite ya' know. It's not the machine's fault that you can't write. It's a sin to do that to a good machine.

I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.

I'm the story of Sheresa. I write a little bit of the fiction of me every day.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.

Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead

Television has raised writing to a new low.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

It is indeed not easy to distinguish affectation from habit; he that has once studiously developed a style, rarely writes afterwards with complete ease

The two most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.

What is written without effort in general is read without pleasure.

Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Lexicographer—A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.