Quotes About Writing

All those who write either explicitly or by insinuation against the dignity, freedom, and immortality of the human soul, may so far forth be justly said to unhinge the principles of morality, and destroy the means of making men reasonably virtuous.

I've got an awful lot of unpublished stuff lying around, but at my age, it's hard to go to auditions and rehearsals and all the rest. Besides, you get frightened. You can stand success, but you're afraid of failure.

Words are like breath," she said, "you say them and they're gone. But writing traps them.

The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.

The purpose of a writer is to keep civilisation from destroying itself." (Interview, New York Post Magazine , September 14, 1958)

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

If the stories come, you get them written, you're on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea, to reform it . . . Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.

Al'inizio lo feci malvolentieri, lo facevo unicamente per dar retta allo Scocciatore, sperando unicamente che la smettesse di tormentarmi. Ma poi ci presi gusto e mi ci dedicai anima e corpo. Avevo scoperto il piacere di scrivere e di ricordare, capivo che in questo modo mi sarei finalmente liberata dal peso del passato e che la penna, come un aratro, avrebbe smosso il terreno della memoria e gli avrebbe dato ordine.

Pero lo peor, pese a todo, no es que haya muchas inexactitudes y mentiras, pues eso quizá sea una característica de todas las memorias. Lo peor es que recordar y poner en el papel lo recordado no trae alivio alguno. En vez de disminuir, las preguntas se multiplican, y la angustia se hace más honda.

Writing kept her sane. Kept her form spinning out of control. Kept her tongue still whenever some white person spoke down to her. She had to write, it was the only thing that was completely hers, that she could look forward to at the end of her long day.

Vergnügungen Der erste Blick aus dem Fenster am Morgen Das wiedergefundene alte Buch Begeisterte Gesichter Schnee, der Wechsel der Jahreszeiten Die Zeitung Der Hund Die Dialektik Duschen, Schwimmen Alte Musik Bequeme Schuhe Begreifen Neue Musik Schreiben, Pflanzen Reisen Singen Freundlich sein

When the Regime commanded the unlawful books to be burned, teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires. Then a banished writer, one of the best, scanning the list of excommunicated texts, became enraged: he'd been excluded! He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath, to write fierce letters to the morons in power — Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen — Haven't I always reported the truth? Now here you are, treating me like a liar! Burn me!

Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm.

I don't know why everybody doesn't write because everybody talks.

The last name had been entered by Samuel Peters' agile pen with much shading of downward strokes and many extra corkscrew appendages...

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.

I hold to fiction as a cure, or partial cure, or cause for hope, or essential distraction from the rain you wake up to, the doubts in your head, the daily desolation that you have not yet said what is most true, you have not yet crafted the story that reveals you. And therefore something waits. Therefore you must wake and you must write and you are not alone. Your fiction is with you.

There is the who they thought they were and the who they wrote down, the something lost and the something gained, the discrepancy, now easily measured, between the voice they hear in their heads and the voice they find on their paper. "Our notebooks give us away," Joan Didion observes. And they do. They also provide, to memoir makers, a shelf and a foundation,

You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.

Because sentences are for making," I finally said. "Sentences are the risks we take.

You will write toward truth but even then you will be lying. For writing freezes what was in time, and time cannot be frozen, and what is here on this page will be left on this page, and you will keep on moving. Over hills. And through cracked valleys.

You think of the courage it takes to be anyone at all and anyone, especially, on the page.

Joseph Mattson is a monster of a writer.