Quotes About Writing

There is only so much revealing one can do. For every self-revelation, there has to be a self-concealment. A life-long commitment to writing involves a balancing of these incompatible needs.

The heaviness of forgiveness descended the moment after I wrote the words.

It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends.

You think that I am angry, but I am not. You think I do not know why you have done what you have done, but I do. You think you have put all your heart into that writing and that every one in England now understands you. What do they understand? Nothing. I understood you before you wrote a word. What you wrote, you wrote for me. For me alone.

When you're writing, you're creating something out of nothing ... A successful piece of writing is like doing a successful piece of magic. [As quoted on WritersServices , 6 March 2012]

Bright yellow leaves flowed swiftly upon the dark, almost-black water, making patterns as they went. To Mr. Segundus the patterns looked a little like magical writing. 'But then,' he thought, 'So many things do.

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

I wanted him to be a poet. I wanted him to adventure out into the world and learn its ways, not losing himself in the jumble of life but seeing it in the poet's eye, and withdrawing after in the library room where he could write his poems of revelation. He would tell what he had seen. He never wrote a word in his life. But he did see.

Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it.

Because I've not written a book before, you mean?" "No, that doesn't matter at all. Most people's first books are their best anyway; it's the one they wanted most to write. No

Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

Then, like a born and bred asshole, he added to the sheriff, "He writes murder mysteries.

They met at one of the Bouchercon mystery conferences. Love among the midlist. "It's raining cats and dogs!" Ted announced, which gives you an idea of the sort of thing they write.

Were those really going to be the final words of fiction I wrote?

They were all in bed before daybreak. And they called themselves writers? Amateurs.

subject" and "genre" are distinctions necessary for shelving a book, but necessarily ruinous distinctions for writing a book deserving of shelving

Forget the fictional characters – how many authors are being stopped on the street?

My famous friend Cal, not recognized in any café or caffè famous but recognized in one or two cafés or caffès and the reading room of the 42nd Street library famous—writerly anti-nonfamous. I've never liked Cal's writing, but I've always liked him—the both of them like family. He's been living in Iowa, teaching on fellowship. All of Iowa must be campuses and crops.

In the end, and done correctly, writing's just another pathology.

If you want to tell the truth, write fiction

After you've found your voice," Collins continued, "you realize there's only one person to imitate and that's yourself … This allows you to be authentic. That's one of the paradoxes of the writing life, that the way to originality is through imitation.

You don't need to wait for inspiration to write. It's easier to be inspired while writing than while not writing...

The basis for the feminist movement was a striving for equality between the sexes. Women can write erotica; therefore, men can write erotica. Or rather, we are allowed to; whether we can is a different issue.