Quotes About Writing

I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.

I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.

Sometimes writing is pure hell. I'll write something and look at it in a few hours and say, This is crap. What will I do with my life? I'll never write again. It's a bipolar business, and you bounce back. You become gripped with some new insight that shows the way.

A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It's a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.

Silence has many advantages…I write and draw in my notebook and I read anything I please.

Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer's block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don't. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.

The essential ingredient of authorship is authority. You hunt it out in a library, you chase it down the street, or you knit it from the fiber of your own will. From somewhere, you get it. You begin

In my first draft every sentence I put down is to advance the story. Each subsequent draft - the 3rd, the 7th, the 27th - is trying to turn each of those sentences into a poem.

There is no perfect time to write. There is only now.

The writing of fiction is a dance between truth and invention

It is widely rumored, and also true, that I wrote my first novel in a closet.

Writing, which was both painful and palliative for me, turned out to be my own way of giving blood in a crisis. I can only hope this unit of words will have a longer shelf life than the forty-two days of a unit of blood, as this critical time blends seamlessly into the next one.

All the noise in my brain. I clamp it to the page so it will be still.

Any writer who waits for inspiration to strike will never finish a book. Inspiration is all very well but it will never replace sheer dogged determination.

stuff in." I patted my new pen in my pocket.

Your story must evoke in you a sense of wonder, a voice that whispers to the reader behind the words, Can you believe this? You must also be a little scared of the story on some level. Writing it has to cost you something. At the very least, there must be the possibility that, writing it, you might discover something you don't want to know.

I read it somewhere once." She laughed. "You did not." "I did. Okay, I wrote it down first. Then I read it. But still.

I got no idea wht a writer of a book should have respect. Or even get the time of day, unless he's a prophet. It's a sign of our present-day hell. Books, think about it, the writer of a book does envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, larceny, greed or what? Oh, vanity. He don't miss a single one of them. He is a peeping Tom, an onanist, a busybody, and he's faking humility every one of God's minutes.

it's always your first attempt every time you write, with your only companions being fear and coffee. That's the way it is a lot of times. You have fear and coffee, and that's it.

Scholars have long recognized that Luke himself wrote these speeches—they are not the speeches that these apostles really delivered at one time or another. Luke is writing decades after the events he narrates, and no one at the time was taking notes.