Quotes About Writing

Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium. With the omnipresent ear and the moving eye, we have abolished writing, the specialized acoustic-visual metaphor that established the dynamics of Western civilization.

The alphabet (and its extension into typography) made possible the spread of the power that is knowledge, and shattered the bonds of tribal man, thus exploding him into an agglomeration of individuals. Electric writing and speed pour upon him, instantaneously and continuously, the concerns of all other men. He becomes tribal once more. The human family becomes one tribe again.

In the middle of a night, hunched over my computer, with the rest of the house dark and quiet, I feel a certain moral superiority to the sleeping world.

Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. Good sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It may be that good sex is something fiction just can't do--like dreams. Most of the sex in my novels is absolutely disastrous. Sex can be funny, but not very sexy.

The only writer who gives me unfeigned pleasure is P.G. Wodehouse. And even him I find a bit heavy. He takes a lot out of me. Scratching my hair, with soft whistles, with lips aquiver, I frown over Sunset at Blandings.

Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.

The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist's couch or even the lovers' bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.

What a gift. This page is briefly stained by my tears of gratitude. Novelists don't usually have it so good, do they, when something real happens (something unified, dramatic and pretty saleable), and they just write it down?

Happiness writes white: it doesn't show up on the page.

To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.

John Updike once argued that although fiction can withstand any amount of egocentricity, it is wholly allergic to narcissism.

They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all day—and they've stopped trying. Now I just dream

Al igual que la escritura, la pintura parece reflejar un mundo patas arriba en el que, por así decirlo, la flecha del tiempo discurre en sentido contrario. Las invisibles líneas de la velocidad hacen pensar en un nexo de secuencia y proceso muy diferente. De nuevo ese razonamiento. Siempre me intriga y me desazona, es curioso. Me pregunto si todas las artes son así.

Whereas I would argue that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified. It's not in the mere narrative arrangement of good and bad that morality makes itself felt. It can be there in every sentence

I love words, that's all. And without this - (Holds up pen.) human history would fall into a black pit and there'd be almost no trace of it.

I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with. I hope the overall view isn't just that though, or I've failed in my writing. There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted character. That's where the real art lies.

People say you should only write what you know. But you only write what you know because you are too fucking stupid to make anything up.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

writing is a gift. Offering someone the chance to read your writing is akin to giving a bit of your soul to someone else.

I am lost without my Boswell.

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man can really succeed if he doesn't move away from where he was born. I believe it is particularly true for the writer.

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.