Quotes About Writing

I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.

In 'Hakon's of Rogen's Saga', I have attempted to tell the story of a boy who lived at the end of the Viking period. It was not written for 'youth,' in the sense that I have blunted my pen before I started. I abhor those writers who have not the skill to keep the attention of adults, and therefore think themselves equipped to write for children. I have done my best, and I leave you to be my critic.

I wanted to write in you.

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you." ? Beatrix Potter

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.

El proceso y las condiciones históricas de enunciación modifican todos los enunciados. El sentido es un efecto frágil (y no sustancial) relacionado con la enunciación: emerge en la actividad de escribir-leer y no está enlazado a las palabras sino a los contextos de las palabras… No hay modo de que un texto sea idéntico a su doble.

You can't write if you can't relate.

I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.

That I was a writer was further proof of God's far-sightedness; she was convinced that by some magic of propinquity she would acquire a mastery of the English language.

had set out to tell you exactly what happened. But since I am the one writing this, how do I know what in my telling I am selecting, omitting, emphasizing; what unconscious editing I am doing?

Wrrite, wrrite, Lapochka, why you don't wrrite?" and assure me that a horse, even with four legs, stumbles. I found it difficult to explain to her what I was writing. "It's about Colley Cibber," I said. "He was an actor, playwright and poet." "Also poet?" Varya asked suspiciously. "Who he? Pushkin?

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

From my earliest days I had a conviction that I was here to write certain things and so from the age of 13, I kept working at that. I was always very busy with my "project" so I'm afraid that I didn't notice much. Much of life has escaped me.

You become a writer because you are convinced that you have a grip on reality of a certain distinctive kind. It belongs to you and to others who share such a recognition.

I didn't want to be ignored. I didn't want my books to be ignored. But I didn't really care to cut such a figure either because ... well, it interferes with the business of writing.

Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may draw on facts from your own life, but if their not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them.

Cicero wouldn't approve of my writing style, but at least I pronounce his name with a hard C.

John Radcliffe, Royal physician to William and Mary, was famous in his own time for reading very little and writing almost nothing. So it stands to reason that one of the most famous libraries in Oxford was his creation.

My movies are unadorned, they're not particularly fancy, I think they're kind of workmanlike in some ways, focusing on the writing and the acting.

In science there is a dictum: don't add an experiment to an experiment. Don't make things unnecessarily complicated. In writing fiction, the more fantastic the tale, the plainer the prose should be. Don't ask your readers to admire your words when you want them to believe your story.

So I started to wonder if I actually could reenter the unicorn's world…at which point Sooz came into my head and the story just happened. It flowed. It was the exact opposite of my experience writing The Last Unicorn. I locked onto her voice, the voice of this nine-and-a-half-year-old girl who was telling the story from the first sentence, and I just followed her. It was one of the very rare occasions where I felt from beginning to end that I knew what I was doing.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rottin', either write things width reading or do things worth writing.

The learned Fool writes his Nonsense in better Language than the unlearned; but still 'tis Nonsense.

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.