Quotes About Writing

Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters.

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

Ecrire, c'est une façon de parler sans être interrompu. (Writing, it's a way of speaking without being interrupted.)

L'accent circonflexe est l'hirondelle de l'écriture.

You can recover from the writing malady only by falling mortally ill and dying.

Une pensée écrite est morte. Elle vivait. Elle ne vit plus. Elle était fleur. L'écriture l'a rendue artificielle, c'est-à-dire immuable.

Kein Philosoph würde ein dickes Buch schreiben, wenn er im Vornherein wüsste, auf welche Weise er später zitiert werden wird.

It has been conservatively estimated that Victoria wrote an average of two and a half thousand words per day during her reign, a total of approximately sixty million words.

Write every day. Even if it's only a letter.

I find it helpful when I stop for the day to leave the last sentence unfinished or the last paragraph only lightly sketched out, so that when I start again I can pick up where I left off the day before.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn't necessary in a long-term relationship. Just as the first caress can lead to a change of heart, the first sentence, however tentative and awkward, can lead to a desire to go just a little further.

And so I wrote. With slavering gusts of animal rage, I wrote- howling like a wolf, bellowing like a patchwork creature composed of stinking corpse parts, my monster face distorted with fury, my skin straining against the crude black stitches that affixed it to the pulsing musculature beneath. I was alive! Every nerve within me sparked with rage

Does one write under any other condition than being possessed by abjection, in an indefinite catharsis?

No concebía oficio más hermoso que el de sumergirse en los mares que forman las palabras.

Sólo si queda escrito que existimos, lo que hicimos y en qué creíamos, nuestra historia no será olvidada.

A verdade deve salvar-se através dos escritos.

Happy endings are all I can do. I wouldn't know how to write anything else.

To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.

When a man writes a romance, the woman dies. When a woman writes one, it ends all tidy and sweet.