Quotes About Writing

I've always said, 'I have nothing to say, only to add.' And it's with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

To turn life into words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round

of all this world's creatures, the author is the vainest

This is not at all bad, except as prose.

And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation

Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together

All good novelists have bad memories.

now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together.

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man he was at the end of the book as he was at the beginning. It is not only that his characters have developed--he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say 'one chooses' with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who — when he has been seriously noted at all — has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me?

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

Perhaps a novelist has a greater ability to forget than other men--he has to forget or become sterile. What he forgets is the compost of the imagination.

I think, for the writer, rather as for the priest, there isn't such a thing as success.

The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic.

I was a correspondent: I thought in headlines.

So much of a novelist's writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

A writer's knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character to life.

A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge. -If you knew how little you had to revenge....

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation – but I think it is equally true of us all.

You know, if you live in a place for long you cease to write about it.' 'Of course I always like to know what the man on the spot has to say,' he replied guardedly. 'And then check it with York?' 'Yes.

Sometimes I feel like I'm writing pornography in the notebook of the gods.