Quotes About Writing

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.

I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.

You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how fortunate you are!

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written.

Anything that happens to me as a writer has been precipitated by an action of my own.

Joyce Carol Oates

I choose to believe Herb Yellin when he says I am a major writer now for one can choose to believe any number of things, encouraging, discouraging, good, bad, neutral, far-fetched, probable, amusing, tragic; etc. and I choose quite openly, quite deliberately, and I hope with a certain modesty, to believe the things, the phrases, the judgments of strangers, that will put me in the most productive mood...that will make me, simply, happier.

Actually nerve is one of the qualities it takes to tackle a first novel, the others being inflated ego and a gambler's sense of crazed bravado, all of which I felt imbued with, more or less, when I sat down to write my account of one woman's efforts to keep her ex-husband, a deranged fence jumper, out of her apartment and life.

I still remember typing the title page on my manual Smith-Corona with clammy hands and a racing heart. When I came to the words, A novel by Joyce Elbert, I heard the New York Philharmonic break into Wagnerian praise for a major new literary voice, yet seconds later doubt and insecurity had crept in.

When the poem throttles your innards, that's when you got to hit the paper and arpeggio the keys—it's up to you.-Juan Felipe Herrera @cilantroman

Es un chico cabreado, sólo eso. Un chico enfadado con el mundo. Y no es para menos. Mejor que saque su rabia así -escribiendo- y no quemando coches. Esos sí son peligrosos. Esos no respetan nada: ni la ortografía, ni la sintaxis, ni el sentido común.

Jerry: If you always want less, in words as well as things, you'll do well as a writer.

If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.

For women, deeply personal writing can also be described as a rebellion against the expected role, though in the case of women, the expectation is that we will be preoccupied with inner lives, with relationships, and with family, but that we will gear our stories to satisfy, flatter, or collude with our immediate circle.

Any well-written memoir is worth perusing with an eye to its structure.

Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest.

While imagination certainly plays a role in both kinds of writing, the application of it in memoir is circumscribed by the facts, while in fiction it is circumscribed by what the reader will believe.

Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing.

PERHAPS IN SOME FORMAL SENSE every book begins by considering its own impossibility, but this book's completion has depended on a way of working with that impossibility without a clear resolution. Even so, something of that impossibility has to be sustained within the writing, even if it continually threatens to bring the project to a halt.

If books could kill, I would have written more of them before I died.

See? I can read between the lies of the lines of the writing on the wail.

Unlike Maxine Kumin, I never learned to pay the syntax.

In this age of censorship I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced--writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices--all because of fear. How many have resorted to self-censorship? How many are saying to themselves, Nope ... can't write about that. Can't teach that book. Can't have that book in our collection. Can't let my student write that editorial in the school paper.