Quotes About Writing

Uncertainty is as good a way as any to kill a story.

El hecho de que uno entable correspondencia con el ausente, con quien no puede hablar, no es menos natural que el de tratar de hacerse entender por escrito cuando uno ha perdido la voz.

Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he'd gotten away with something, said John Updike. Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn't become a writer. The problem of self-doubt. The problem of shame. The problem of self-loathing. You once put it like this: When I get so fed up with something I'm writing that I decide to quit, and then, later, I find myself irresistibly drawn back to it, I always think: Like a dog to its vomit.

It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about - also mostly college students - the internet barely exists.

there is at least one book in you that cannot be written by anyone else but you. My advice is to dig deep and find

No writing is ever wasted, you used to say. Even if something doesn't work out and you end up throwing it away, as a writer you always learn something. Here

When do people ever like it when you write about them? But I had to do something. As I said, from the minute I heard what had happened I could not stop thinking about it. So I did what you do if you're a writer and you're obsessed about something: you turn it into a story that you hope will lay it to rest, or at least help you figure it out what it means. Even if we know from experience that this pretty much never works.

You write a thing down because you're hoping to get a hold on it. You write about experiences partly to understand what they mean, partly not to lose them to time. To oblivion.

A friend of mine who is working on a memoir says, I hate the idea of writing as some kind of catharsis, because it seems like that can't possibly produce a good book. You cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing, warns Natalia Ginzburg. Turn then to Isak Dinesen, who believed that you could make any sorrow bearable by putting it into a story or telling a story about it.

When I ask him why he thinks I should have known that he was writing about himself, he looks puzzled and says, Who else would I be writing about?

Losing the memory of the experience itself to the memory of writing about it. Like people whose memories of places they've traveled to are in fact only memories of the pictures they took there. In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they ever preserve of it. So it could happen: by writing about someone lost—or even just talking too much about them—you might be burying them for good.

Find the right tone and you can write about anything

No writing is ever wasted, you used to say. Even if something doesn't work out and you end up throwing it away, as a writer you always learn something.

The sound of a pen scratching in the night is a holy sound.

Whole scenes of your life can slip away forever if you don't put them down in ink.

I still cannot define a noun, let alone a definite or indefinite article, or an objective personal pronoun. I rely on spell-check to guide my use of 'to' or 'too'. Does it matter? Colleagues said to me: 'If you want to write, just get on and write. Don't wait for a qualification.

In a blink of a life my brother James, mother and I lost a vital part of our tiny family. We were devastated. I felt completely bereft. And then 9/11 happened. And I had written the only book in the world about the group behind the devastating attack.

God is the finger; God is writing; God, is above all else, words.

Vigenère's work culminated in his Traicté des Chiffres ("A Treatise on Secret Writing"), published in 1586. Ironically, this was the same year that Thomas Phelippes was breaking the cipher of Mary Queen of Scots. If only Mary's secretary had read this treatise, he would have known about the Vigenère cipher, Mary's messages to Babington would have baffled Phelippes, and her life might have been spared.

alphabetic scripts tend to have between 20 and 40 characters (Russian, for example, has 36 signs, and Arabic has 28).

scripts that rely on semagrams tend to have hundreds or even thousands of signs (Chinese has over 5,000).

Ik schrijf zo snel omdat ik benieuwd ben naar de afloop.

Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.

The first slips of snow white unlined paper, six inches by four, and covered with William Minor's neat, elaborately cursive, and so distinctively American handwriting in greenish black ink, began to drift out from the Broadmoor post room in the spring of 1885.