Quotes About Writing

In this way, writers are indeed, as Henry Miller suggested, traitors to the human race. We may turn a light on inequity, injustice, and oppression from time to time, but we regularly kill what we love in insidious fashion.

Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning, I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write this thing. But that's not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and . . . dishonest, making a buck writing.

It seems priggish or pollyannaish to deny that my intention in writing the work was to titillate the nastier propensities of my readers. My own healthy inheritance of original sin comes out in the book and I enjoyed raping and ripping by proxy. It is the novelist's innate cowardice that makes him depute to imaginary personalities the sins that he is too cautious to commit for himself.

There is only one kind of immorality in fiction, and that is when you write badly.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

A work of fiction should be, for its author, a journey into the unknown, and the prose should convey the difficulties of the journey.

There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.

Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.

If the author of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea and the Nick Adams stories had been an undersized weed, asthmatic or phthisic, living out strong-man fantasies in the literature he produced, he would still be one of the great American writers.

I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't.

When you're at odds with yourself, it's hard to create. Sometimes the writing process is as easy as opening up the window and letting in the breeze. And sometimes it's like chiseling away at a block of granite with a pencil.

We laid down the basic tracks, but I was still having trouble with the lyrics. A lot had to do with my state of mind. When you're at odds with yourself, it's hard to create. Sometimes the writing process is as easy as opening up the window and letting in the breeze. And sometimes it's like chiseling away at a block of granite with a pencil.

I always think one ought to be grateful to an author if one has liked even a small bit of a book.

I indicated that I wrote for the papers, not mentioning books because, if not specifically in your line, authorship is an embarrassing subject for all concerned. Besides, it never sounds like a serious occupation.

I knew myself incapable of writing a line of a novel – by then I had written three or four – however long released from duty. Whatever inner processes are required for writing novels, so far as I myself was concerned, war now utterly inhibited. That was one of the many disagreeable aspects of war. It was not only physically inescapable, but morally inescapable too.

In its vulgar way, a painstaking piece of work, although one must always remember—something often forgotten today—that because things are generally known, they are not necessarily the better for being written down, or publicly announced. Some are, some aren't. As in everything else, good sense, taste, art, all have their place. Saying you prefer to disregard art, taste, good sense, does not mean that those elements do not exist—it merely means you lack them yourself

Has any writer ever told the truth about women?' he had asked. . . . 'Possibly. Nor about men either, if it comes to that.

Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded.

There was a pause. Maclintick, unable to bear the sight and sound of these negotiations, had taken a notebook from his pocket and begun a deep examination of his own affairs; making plans for the future; writing down great thoughts; perhaps even composing music.

Reading novels needs almost as much talent as writing them,' he used to say.

An important aspect of writing unmentioned by Burton was 'priority'; what to tell first. That always seemed one of the basic problems.

I have from the first felt sure that the writer, when he sits down to commence his novel, should do so, not because he has to tell a story, but because he has a story to tell. The novelist's first novel will generally have sprung from the right cause.

She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good.

The writer of stories must please, or he will be nothing. And he must teach whether he wish to teach or no. How