Quotes About Writing

The Storm Pages became my route to self-revelation. In them I experienced events of the day in slow motion, more powerfully in retrospect than I could as they whizzed by in real time. I dared to be truthful, to record not what I wished I had felt but what I, in truth, actually did feel. Writing had become a way of honoring my authentic selves.

Lo scrittore è obbligato a guardare sotto ogni pietra. Può e dovrebbe rifiutare alcuni comportamenti o scelte nella sua vita personale. Ma non può fare a meno di contemplare l'intero spettro della condizione umana.

Writing the musical City of Angels was a wonderful job I gave myself. I returned to my loves of swing music and black-and-white movies and to the Los Angeles of my boyhood--playwright and tv writer Larry Gelbart

I can count all the ways in which being a mother has enriched my understanding of the world, of character, my sense of the future and my attachment to it. I can't imagine what kind of writer I'd be if I didn't have my kids.

Good ideas ought not to be dressed up in bad prose.

Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.

The S. D. D. comes out in June, I'm told. Prepublication sales have been quite good and Cape are reissuing STG and Less Than Angels. I don't think I shall ever be liable for VAT but I have bought a new account book (as advised in the last no. of The Author – I expect sales have shot up!). But the main thing is to feel that I am now regarded as a novelist, a good feeling after all those years of 'This is well written, but…

It's not publishing that matters; it's not writing that matters. What matters is feeling alive while writing, washing dishes, driving, etc. Writing just gives you a solid place to land some of that God energy that is already within you.

In fact, our bodies are never the same--each minute, they undergo changes, even if imperceptible. Eisenstein (2001, 40-41) points out that we have many bodies, which influence our accounts of reality: 'Writing from the body, my body, my different bodies, I have different stories to tell. They are all all of a piece although they are also fragmentary as through each body experience has its own narration (13).

I only have love affairs with a notebook.

The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.

In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense.

It must always be an amazement how 18th century letter writers - even, and especially, officials - had the time and capacity to produce their sculpted sentences and perfection of grammar and mots justes , while 20th century successors can only envy the past and leave their readers painfully to pick their way through thickets of academic and the mud of bureaucratic jargon.

As a writer, I will go down any dark alley, inch my way through the tightest crawl space, and feed on your every fear. I will take your sense of calm and tear it to shreds. - Horror Author Barbara Watkins

The words came to her in torrents, they cascaded through her brain and she just had to hold the pen. Sometimes when she was writing they came so quickly that she could hardly keep up. It was a wonderful feeling when the words poured from the pen without her needing to think for one second about what she should write.

There's a couple of reasons why I write poetry more than anything else. I have written a few, what could be called short stories, something longer than flash fiction, but after about 6 pages I found that I'm desperate to figure out how to get out of what I've created. Using that many words overwhelms me and I feel like I'm drowning.

Writing is a kind of centering, a kind of meditation. I find it to be profoundly rewarding. Actually, I'm an addict. If I go too long, and so far that hasn't been longer than a week, I start to feel unsettled, nervous. I begin to feel that I'm not engaged, a disconnection is threatening my world, that I'm being passed by and I'm both failing myself and the world by not writing about it.

I clearly remember that I finished my first poem, though it was not very good, when I was 16 years old. I wrote it on a desk pad. It was called "Requiem" and had phrases like "the seasick swaying trees."

Sometimes when a prose poem is floundering, I rewrite it as verse, and it's better in that form. The reverse process of verse into prose poem, also works to clarify what's working in the writing and what's not. It's not a blunt line that demarcates the difference between verse and the prose poem.

Though I do keep lists of words that catch my attention for a variety of reasons, they rarely make it into poems, not infrequently because I lose the lists.

Adopting the prose poem, allowed me to think and write more openly and broadly, and to extend and sustain a subject or object of attention more that I could in a verse poem.

One of the diseases of this age is the multitude of books. It is a thriftless and a thankless occupation, this writing of books: a man were better to sing in a cobbler?s shop, for his pay is a penny a patch; but a book-writer, if he get sometimes a few commendations from the judicious, he shall be sure to reap a thousand reproaches from the malicious.

You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang.