Quotes About Writing

My feeling is that writing is, for me, a pathological condition. That could sound like a mystical experience, and it may be a mystical experience, but I have learnt just to go with it.

Faithfulness to the past can be a kind of death above ground. Writing of the past is a resurrection; the past then lives in your words and you are free.

Writing is sort of putting a puzzle together halfway. Then, performing it has always been the completion of it. Once that happens, I'm feeling verbally communal with other people. It's out there and I feel so much better about it.

Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!

The chronic fun of writing, the distraction of it, was not knowing.

I didn't want to be like the novelist who spent so much time rewriting his first sentence that he never wrote his second.

It didn't take me long to see that I did better when I had less time. Not several hours but ninety minutes turned out to be the optimally efficient length of time—long enough for me to get some real work done but not so long that I started to goof off or lose concentration. As a consequence, I began to organize my day into ninety-minute writing blocks

I suggested that he write from 11:00 to 1:00 every weekday. During that time, he was to write or do nothing. No email; no calls; no research; no clearing off a desk; no hanging out with Jack, my adorable, three-year-old, train-obsessed nephew. Write, or stare out the window. "Remember," I added, "working is one of the most dangerous forms of procrastination. You want to use your writing time for writing only. Nothing else, including no other kinds of work.

Lewis's brilliant essay "On Three Ways of Writing for Children":

perhaps the most acute source of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea–the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture.

Perhaps—like writing, leadership, and a sense of humor—good habits are something that must be learned, but can't be taught.

To do the intellectually demanding work of writing, I leave my home office and my three beloved computer monitors to work at the wonderful old library that's just a block from my apartment. The atmosphere of a library helps me to think. When I want to take a break, instead of heading to the kitchen for a snack, I wander among the many floors of books.

But perhaps the most acute sense of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea - the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture.

I feel unsettled at any time when I'm not writing. And I mean that. There's a sense of peace, and of being in the right place, that I experience only when I'm writing.

Whenever I start a new book, I think, "This is the most interesting subject of all time. It's sad, I'll never enjoy writing another book as much as I enjoy this one." Every time, I'm convinced. And then I change my mind when I start the next book.

The most important piece of writing advice: Have something to say. Whenever I have trouble writing, it's because I'm trying to write about something I don't care about. Once I know what I'm trying to say, writing is a joy. Other advice: read, read, read. GRETCHEN RUBIN

Clarity is one reason that the Strategy of Scheduling is so helpful. It's important to have time to write; to have time with my family; to read. Instead of spending my day in a chaos of warring priorities, and feeling as though whatever I do I'm leaving important things undone, I can use the clarity of Scheduling to guarantee that I have time and energy to devote to each activity that matters.

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

Writing is a dog's life, but the only one worth living.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes.

Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.