Quotes About Writing

Judy Blume spent her childhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, making up stories inside her head. She has spent her adult years in many places, doing the same thing, only now she writes her stories down on paper. Her twenty-seven books have won many awards, including the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Judy lives in Key West and New

Writing is the voice that calls us from dreams, that peeks out of the corner of our eyes when we think no one is looking, the longing that breaks out hearts even when we think we should be happiest, and to which we cannot give a name.

People say I've made a living travelling the world, but that's not quite right. I like to think instead that I've made a living 'writing' the world - in notebooks, on laptops, phones and postcards, the backs of lunch receipts, and the edges of maps and tourist brochures.

Socrates identified the practice of philosophy with personal discussion and questioning, refusing to write anything.

Boredom is just "What's the use?" in disguise. And "What's the use?" is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page.

We have this idea that we need to be in the mood to write. We don't.

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written

When we forget ourselves, when we let go of being good and just settle into just being a writer, we begin to have the experience of writing through us. We retire as the self-conscious author and become something else - the vehicle for self-expression. When we are just the vehicle, the storyteller and not the point of the story, we often write very well - we certainly write more easily.

Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes out of it.

You're very Johnny Depp in Secret Window.

They know when they face the white paper for their real work that their unconscious mind is a lost continent which may give them flashes of wit and grossness and metaphorical beauty

But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.

We write to make sense of it all.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

How do I know what I think till I see what I say?

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true.

You're never confident. You go in fear and trembling every day. It would be awfully nice to think that you know how to write a novel. But what you know is the novel you just wrote. You don't have the slightest notion how to write the one you're going to do next.

I was writing up a New Mexico snow-storm, I had it coming down thick and heavy, muffling the roads and mounding on adobe walls and windowsills and whitening the piñon and junipers when the tapping came on the door.

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.

This time she was writing the guidebook herself, as she went, and its authority could not be challenged or repudiated.

And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a job for amateurs, dilettantes, part-time thinkers, 25-watt feelers, the lazy, the insensitive, or the imitative. It is for the creative, and creativity implies both talent and hard work.