Quotes About Writing

I write to reach eternity

Having a little talent as a writer is like having a little talent as a brain surgeon.

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic.

If you can dream it, you can write it. After all, a dream is just a dream until you bring it to fruition.

Writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.

Humility is not a virtue in a writer, it is an absolute necessity.

A lot of novelists start late—Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it's working on; then you can write a novel.

I would say that fiction is something you write in spite of the research that you've done, not because the research you've done.

I wrote my first novel, McFarlane Boils The Sea, under the influence of Kelman and Proust, which is like drinking a cocktail of Bowmore and Châteauneuf du Pape. ( James Meek in interview with TMO )

Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at the old typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing pops into your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you do when this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays- I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd.

For some it is harder to write a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic.

Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes everything you've got.

Hard at work on a new one, huh? What's this one called?" "A Feast of Souls." "A Feast of Souls," Ben said. "Classy." I slowed, unsure whether or not I had detected a hint of sarcasm in my neighbor's tone.

An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.

And what holds good of verse holds infinitely better in respect to prose.

Writing is like a battle. You're often so into it you don't have any high ideals. You're just doing it. I have all these boxing prints on my walls. I always feel that's what I am, a boxer. I get my brains knocked out every so often.

File cabinets were closed with determined thuds like mortar rounds going off, and the rapid chatter of typewriter keys sounded like machine guns strafing the paper into submission.

What is written is more influential than what is said.

Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

As for my writing. I like it enough to keep going. I dislike it enough to keep going

The reader lives faster than life, the writer lives slower.