Quotes About Writing

But words came halting forth, wanting Inventions stayInvention, Natures child, fled step-dame Studys blows...Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,Fool, said my Muse to me look in thy heart and write.

Whosoever, in writing a modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth.

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I shall not put.

MacDonald has the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thoughts.

And the pen, as it were, Dear Reader, is now in my hand, and I am claiming the advantage, taking it for myself, for you will notice that the written word hides the body of the one who writes. For all you know, I might be a MAN in disguise. Unlikely, you say, with all this feminist prattle flying out here and there and everywhere, but can you be sure?

Je n'écris plus, je suis écrite. (p.86)

I loved it so much I was sorry to finish it. I closed the book and shocked myself by thinking, This is better than life. I didn't mean or want to think this, but I'm afraid I did. Certainly this feeling about a book is the one that makes people want to write. I don't know why I feel more alive when I write, but I do.

Writing novels means being plural, being divided among your creatures and suffering with them.

Crippled and crazy, we hobble toward the finish line, pen in hand.

There were many books inside me by then, and yet these jolted me with their originality. I met the man before I read what he had written, but if I had not loved his work as I did or if he had not admired my writing, it would have changed things. Our work has been an intimate part of our love affair and marriage for twenty-three years, but what I read wasn't then and isn't now what I know when I'm with him. His work comes from the place in him I can't know.

I am afraid of writing, too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where the walls don't hold. I don't know what's there, but I'm pulled toward it.

and although the young writer never met his literary mentor, the spiritual connection between the two writers would never be dissolved.

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

I don't think you can write - at least not well - if you don't love stories, love the written word.

So I find the fascination, the love, the incredible skill and everything to do with acting, writing plays, and doing them, just darling. Lovely. I love actors.

I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books.

I write to understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality, to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it!

Some people consider the way Shakespeare was writing about Ophelia as erotomania-that she was delusional in thinking that Hamlet was in love with her. But I don't think so.

I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.

I've always wondered, am I a writer who preaches or a preacher who writes? I don't know. I love them both.

I love the idea of the vignette, which is associated with the decorative, illustrative, small, and thus with the feminine, and thus easily maligned. I mean, Emily Dickinson wrote vignettes, right?