Quotes About Writing

Reading is the parent of fine writing. It fosters familiarity with the written word & sets the template for a writer's journey ~ Mark Rubinstein

Many writers vacillate between believing writing is its own reward, and the need for acceptance is the big reward.

The writing life is punctuated by words, sentences, paragraph & pages. And by spurts of elation, inspiration, rejection & despair.

Imagination is a writer's refuge and a renewable source of energy.

Be yourself behind the pen, not Hemingway, Joyce or Faulkner. Find your own voice. Let your own mind run through your fingers.

A writer is never unemployed.

When writing a sentence or phrase, ask yourself if you've ever heard or read it before. If you have, it's a cliché. Get rid of it.

A writer must learn to trust the process; the words and ideas will flow from some deep inner recess once the writing has begun.

Sometimes,I open a book I wrote. Reading the words, they seem to have come from some hidden recess of my mind, far from my waking self, from another mysterious realm. It's a mystery to me. It's the magic of the mind.

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

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 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.

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.

He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.

Because a great many otherwise admirable men do not read books American women write, I wanted to use a decidedly male pseudonym. When Harper's magazine took a chapter, and then Atlantic Monthly, I was so tickled I used my real name, and the jig was pretty much up.

Thomas Mann was a prodigy of production. Working full time, he wrote a page a day. That is 365 pages a year, for he did write every day—a good-sized book a year. At a page a day, he was one of the most prolific literary writers who ever lived.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, 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 the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is... what he will know.

W HEN YOU WRITE , you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote ''Huckleberry Finn'' in Hartford. Recently scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.

It is the beginning of a work that the writer throws away.

I started to make a literary being of myself, someone who lives as if her experiences were to be written down someday.

She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.