Quotes About Writing

For Twain, the notion that great writing had to be drawn from life–rather than from what an author heard, read, or simply imagined–was an article of faith, at the heart of his conception of how serious writers worked.

If letters had eyebrows, these would be arched.

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.

Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott. You can't write.

They didn't have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into a chair, then tied the pencil around his hand (the paper had already been nailed down). Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear: 'You look like a god sitting there. Why don't you try writing something?

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal, for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons, and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.

Don't get it right, get it written.

A life spent at one's desk is a life alone.

I think politics is deadly to write about, frankly. If you have a political agenda and you set out to write a novel to prove that, say, capitalism should crumble, then it's going to be a really bad novel. Very few people have been able to deal with political fiction - Dickens, Dostoyevsky. But even Tolstoy got really tiresome when he was talking about the serfs. You have to let characters be characters, not [gruff voice] Mr Capitalism or [girlie voice] Miss Anti-Fur.

I have plenty of information now, but I can't get it into words. I'm afraid it's too big a task for me. I wonder if I will find everything in life too big for my abilities. Well, time will tell. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in naval history in his spare time while in law school

I'm giving my whole life to breaking the butterfly of a John Rockefeller upon the wheel of my ponderous articles

I read them (articles TR wrote on his honeymoon) all over to Edith and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.

When he came upon a passage that Struck him, he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there until he did get paper," she recalled, "and then he would rewrite it" and keep it in a scrapbook so that he could preserve it.

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.

I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.

A writer is the conscience of the world.

she could not see what good it would do anyone to read a novel of this kind. Yet she was writing it.

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful.... You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing.

I have to conclude that fiction is better at "the truth" than a factual record. Why this should be so is a very large subject and one I don't begin to understand. DORIS LESSING

You're suggesting I should write of our experience? How? If I set down every word of the exchange between us during an hour, it would be unintelligible unless I wrote the story of my life to explain it.

It frightens me that when I'm writing I seem to have some awful second sight, or something like it, an intuition of some kind; a kind of intelligence is at work that is much too painful to use in ordinary life; one couldn't live at all if one used it for living.

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.