Quotes About Writing

My head is like some ridiculous barn packed full of stuff I want to write about.

I didn't have the vaguest idea of what to do – I couldn't keep staring at the wall forever, I told myself. But even that admonition didn't work. A faculty advisor reviewing a graduation thesis would have had the perfect comment: you write well, you argue clearly, but you don't have anything to say.

If possible, I would like my readers to savor that same emotion when they read my books. I want to open a window in their souls and let the fresh air in. This is what I think of, and hope for, as I write—purely and simply.

Perhaps I'm just too painstaking a type of person, but I can't grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing.

Those people digging around in the refrigerator at 3am, those are the only people I can write for. And that, is me.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

Everything was too sharp and clear, so that I could never tell where to start - the way a map that shows to much can sometimes be useless. Now, though I realize that all I can place in the imperfect vessel of writing are imperfect memories and imperfect thoughts.

En definitiva -así lo creo-, lo único que puedo verter en este receptáculo imperfecto que es un texto son recuerdos imperfectos, pensamientos imperfectos. (Tokio Blues. Norwegian wood - Traducción del japonés por Lourdes Porta)

There's no such thing as a perfect piece of writing. Just as there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Give me time, I thought, and I can turn out something much better. This may sound arrogant for someone who not long before had never given a thought to writing a novel. It even sounds arrogant to me. In all honesty, though, anyone who lacks that level of arrogance is unlikely to become a novelist.

Writing honestly is very difficult. The more I try to be honest, the farther my words sink into darkness. -from Hear the Wind Sing

Waves of consciousness roll in, roll out, leave some writing, and just as quickly new waves roll in and erase it. I try to quickly read what's written there, but it's hard.

Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.

How wonderful it is to be able to write someone a letter ! To feel like conveying your thoughts to a person, to sit at your desk and pick up a pen, to put your thoughts into words like this is truly marvellous. Of course, once i do put them into words, I find I can only express a fraction of what I want to say, but that's all right. I'm happy just to be able to feel I want to write to someone. And so I am writing to you.

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent you can forget about being a novelist.

It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.

I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

The task of writing consists primarily in recognizing the distance between oneself and the things around one. It is not sensitivity one needs, but a yardstick.

Anyone in their right mind would never undertake to write a novel in the first place. Given the circumstances, therefore, it is perfectly acceptable to be deranged as long as you are aware of that fact.

Writing a book brings a single, irreducible truth right out to the edges of a person: there is no place to be, there is no place in this world, it is impossible to be happy.

Lonely children probably wrote the bible

So long as my heart is full of love and the heads of my fellow-men are full of folly, I shall never lack something to write about.

But fiction is not, as many nonwriters seem to think, a random grab bag of made-up whimsies, as undisciplined and unreasoned as a dream. Nor is it simply reporting with the names changed. It is an amalgam of experience, education, reading, insight, analysis, conversations, observation, and conscious research.

Variety is definitely the spice of life but I love writing office romances (I was a secretary before I became a writer), because it's every girl's dream to meet that gorgeous hunky boss who sweeps her off her feet and takes her out of her dull routine.