Quotes About Writing

A writer who writes more than he reads is an amateur.

The only difference, I suppose, between them and me is that I never set out to write shit. (That is: merely sufficient, average.) And of all the crimes that may be attributed to me—numbering among them rudeness, lechery, viciousness, imprudence and disgusting egocentricity—the one that can never be laid on me is the one epitomized by the line, "I just write what they want, by Tuesday, take the money and run.

Recovery comes slowly. But the writing—which keeps me alive because it's all I've got—goes on.

The writer of swashbuckling adventures is a pathetic little homosexual who still lives with his invalid mother.

People on the outside think there's something magical about writing, that you go up in the attic at midnight and cast the bones and come down in the morning with a story, but it isn't like that. You sit in back of the typewriter and you work, and that's all there is to it.

When I was eighteen I decided I wanted to be a writer. I attended Ohio State University, and after discovering writing is a thing of the genes, not the schoolrooms, I left college to attempt a professional career behind the typewriter. I

Und er ging auf die Suche nach dem Wahnsinnigen, der seinen Namen in Großbuchstaben schrieb.

He can't think, he can't write. There's no discernible talent.

Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctually reach out for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the Internet.

All canonical writing possesses the quality of making you feel strangeness at home.

I cannot locate any aestetic dignity in [Stephen] King's writing: his public could not sustain it, nor could he...Art unfortunately is rarely the fruit of earnestness, and King will be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader.

La escritura mala es toda igual; la buena escritura es de una diversidad escandalosa.

I could not find any evidence that her circumstances had harmed Jane Austen's work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. Her mind consumed all impediments.

Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.

At eighty-four, I can only write the way I go on teaching, personally and passionately.

BLOOM: As far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they're called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it. INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits? BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

To Lincoln, words always mattered most. Newspaper stories lived but a single day, caricatures flamed into view and just as quickly faded, and even the most flattering photographs inevitably receded behind the thick covers of family albums. But words lived forever. Writing, Lincoln believed, was "the great invention of the world.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama

About your writing with you left hand, are you ambidextrous, Mr. Ewell? I most positively am not, I can use one hand good as the other. One hand good as the other.

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. [ Writer's Digest , September 1961]

Pleading's little more than putting on paper what you want to say.

she'd already gotten me in trouble once today: she had taught me to write and it was all her fault.