Quotes About Writing

Stia totul despre literatura, in afara de modul in care se putea bucura de ea.

His novel, a work he had wrestled with, on and off, for almost three years, he had finally abandoned after one page. The novel was derivative of a poem Gold had written seven years before that was itself derived from a brilliant exegesis by a young Englishman of the works of Samuel Beckett that Gold wished he'd written himself.

At the time, Heller was also working on his first novel, Catch-18. New World Writing published the first chapter in 1955; three years later Heller had a contract to publish the novel with Simon & Schuster. To avoid confusion with Leon Uris's 1961 novel Mila 18, Catch-18 was changed to Catch-22 before its publication in the same year.

He was generally disappointed by the new novels of the early postwar years: "There was a terrible sameness about books being published and I almost stopped reading as well as writing.

You are sure to be censured by malevolent Criticks and Bug Writers, who will abuse you while you are serving them, and wound your Character in nameless Pamphlets, thereby resembling those little dirty stinking Insects that attack us only in the dark, disturbing our Repose, molesting and wounding us while our Sweat and Blood is contributing to their Subsistence. Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris JULY 26, 1781

If you detect a needlessly complex style when you read, look for characters and actions so that you can unravel for yourself the complexity the writer needlessly inflicted on you.

When we knowingly write in ways that we would not want others to write to us, we abrade the trust that sustains a civil society.

my generation's screwed—we're not the immigrant experience, we're not the assimilation experience—we're the first nothing generation, we've got nothing to write about and no one to read it, everyone too busy getting technologized, too harried with degrees.

May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I'd be allowed to decide anything at all.

IF ANYTHING DISTINGUISHES MY GENERATION of American writers, it's that everyone in my generation became a writer, simply through the act of going online. More words have been written, more words have been read, by my generation than by any other generation in human history.

Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln's Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer's rule applies: Have the courage to write badly.

It is the most fun I'm ever going to have. I love to write. I love it. I mean, there's nothing in the world I like better, and that includes sex, probably because I'm so very bad at it. It's the greatest peace when I'm in a scene, and it's just me and the character, that's it, that's where I want to live my life.

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it?

When Roseanne read the first script of mine that got into her hands without being edited by someone else she said, 'How can you write a middle-aged woman this well?' I said, 'If you met my mom you wouldn't ask'.

I myself have never enjoyed anything more than writing. I love to live in that world.

I write to give myself a strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

I just thought, 'Wait a minute, if I'm going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place.' And this is the least quiet place I've ever been in my life. … It's like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It's like, 'Um, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just…I have to…It's super important for my law!

Poetry (and other forms of writing) can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark. Or a device with which to admire the complexity of the stories in which we have become entangled. Sometimes the only way out is by voice, following the music into the impossible.

The question that comes up when you write about trauma is, are you retraumatizing? Are you retraumatizing by writing about trauma? That's a good question. I remember the writer, poet Meridel Le Sueur, social activist in the '30, calling to tell me when I was a young woman, she said: "I wrote so beautifully about terrible things that happened. And was I wrong to do that?

When writing goes painfully, when it's hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

Starting a novel is like standing in a field and waiting for lightning to strike.