Quotes About Writing

is perhaps difficult to imagine so creative a mind working without a single work of lexicographical reference beside him, other than Mr. Cooper's crib (which Mrs. Cooper once threw into the fire, prompting the great man to begin all over again) and Mr. Wilson's little manual, but that was the condition under which his particular genius was compelled to flourish.

A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.

By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes.

It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long.

La scrittura esige virtù scoraggianti, sforzi, pazienza; è un'attività solitaria in cui il pubblico esiste solo come speranza.

Il fatto è che sono una scrittrice: una donna scrittrice non è una donna di casa che scrive, ma qualcuno la cui intera esistenza è condizionata dallo scrivere. È una vita che ne vale un'altra: che ha i suoi motivi, il suo ordine, i suoi fini che si possono giudicare stravaganti solo se di essa non si capisce niente.

Ja, wenn ich Ihre Energie hätte...' Mit Energie hat das gar nichts zu tun, dachte ich beim Aussteigen. Ich könnte einfach nicht leben, ohne zu Schreiben.

I got the desire to write very young, at fourteen or fifteen years of age … I endured the world which was given to me sometimes with joy, often with revolt or boredom; I wanted to make it mine in order to justify it in some way. So I thought I had everything to say: the whole world, life, everything. In my youthful, adolescent diaries, at eighteen, nineteen years old, this leitmotif appears over and over: I will say everything, I have everything to say.

Writing is actually the translation of a text we already carry within us

If you want to be a writer, learn to type.

In some respects, writing was his only form of human interaction.

Lewis's first novel appeared in November 1912 under the pseudonym of Tom Graham, because Lewis regarded it as a pot boiler, which was written quickly to pay the bills rather than for any artistic endeavour. It had an initial print run of 1,000 copies and sold less than 800 of those. Lewis later revealed that it was written "on a wharf in Provincetown, Mass. on a vacation from my bosses".

Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.

I see manuscripts and books that are spoiled for the literary reader because they are one long stream of top-of-the-head writing, a writer telling a story without concern for precision or freshness in the use of language. Some of this storytelling reads as if it were spoken rather than written, stuffed with tired images that pop into the writer's head because they are so familiar. The top of the head is fit for growing hair, but not for generating fine prose.

It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing

What I have never witnessed is a writer's work succeeding notably in a field he doesn't habitually read for pleasure.

We are all writers from an early age. Most of what we write is nonfiction—essays for school, letters to friends, memoranda to colleagues—in which we are trying to pass on information. We are raised with a traditional nonfiction mind-set. Even when we write love letters, we are trying to communicate how we feel and not necessarily trying to evoke an emotion in the recipient, though that might be better suited to our purpose.

Inaccurate similes and metaphors have the effect of deflecting the reader's attention from the story to the words on the page. Yet when carried off, especially when a simile is original and a metaphor sings, there is no greater glory in the practice of words.

The Art & Craft of Novel Writing by Oakley

All of us, in our daily speech to others, are not only trying to communicate information but to get something off our minds and into the consciousness of the listeners. When we write, we put down on paper what we think, know, or believe we know and pay little attention to the effect on the reader. That is discourteous in life and unsuccessful in writing. We practice our craft to service the reader, not our psyches.

The best of good writing will entice us into subjects and knowledge we would have declared were of no interest to us until we were seduced by the language they were dressed in.

Tasting," she says, removing my pen and paper from my hands. "Not writing. You need to use your senses. Your instincts.

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.

The writer] can easily foresee his fate ... in an age when an author who wants to have readers must take care to write in such a way that the book can easily be perused during an afternoon nap ....