Quotes About Writing

So, why do you write these strong female characters? Because you're still asking me that question.

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.

So, why do you write these strong female characters? Because you're still asking me that question." [ Equality Now speech, May 15, 2006]

Elsewhere, people like Aunt Emily clack away at their typewriters, spreading words like buckshot, aiming at the shadow in the sky.

Aunt Emily's writing is as wispy and hard to decipher as the marks of a speed skater on ice.

A novel wants to befriend you, a short story almost never.

So many times in a single day we glimpse a view beyond the apparent. Write those moments down. They might not speak to you at first. But eventually they might. Everybody writes too long and too much anyway, sacrificing significance for story. Truth be told, we all want to be poets.

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve--hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve--not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us.

Alice heard a woman say, 'Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested, and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted, and confused. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it.

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

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

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…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

My romance writing began with an avid romance-reading mother who devoured so many romances each week that I decide to save library trips by supplementing the supply myself.

Perhaps it takes a hybrid to help create a body of writing where once there was only oral tradition.

I am a southern woman, and I write about the places that flavor me. I cannot help myself.

Through writing, I have been looking back ever since, trying to recapture all that was left behind

I piddle with words.

In the 1950s, there was a sense that literature and writing had a burning importance — that you could write a book or paint a painting and change the world. That kind of faith seems to be lacking now. Literature has been pushed toward the sidelines of [modern day] culture. There isn't that sense of centrality or permanence to the written word — everything seems more disposable.

The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

Una navaja en el cuello. ¿La literatura o la vida?, preguntó el ladrón. Desde entonces no he vuelto a escribir nada. Supongo que estoy muerto.

Creo que la lectura y la escritura nos permiten ensanchar la vida, ya que alargarla no podemos