Quotes About Writing

Every writing course I ever heard of said the same thing. Take one story, follow it through, beginning, middle, end. I don't do that. I never do. Behind the story I tell is the one I don't. Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people's seemed real -- the lives I had read about in books.

You are trying to put something on the page worth what it costs you to put it on the page.

The best fiction comes from the place where the terror hides, the edge of our worst stuff. I believe, absolutely, that if you do not break out in that swear of fear when you write, then you have not gone far enough.

Every time I sit down to write, I have a great fear that anything I write will reveal me as the monster I was always told I would be, but that fear is personal, something I must face in everything I do, every act I contemplate.

The things you hesitate to talk about," Bertha repeated in her husky North Carolina accent, "those are the things you should be writing about.

I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one's own life and see it as a story.

As I was finishing the copyediting of Bastard, I found myself thinking about all I had read when Kate Millett published Flying: her stated conviction that telling the truth was what feminist writers were supposed to do. That telling the truth—your side of it anyway, knowing that there were truths other than your own—was a moral act, a courageous act, an act of rebellion that would encourage other such acts.

Maybe not for anyone else, but for me, the kind of person I am, writing meant an attempt to sneak up on the truth, to figure it out slowly through the characters on the page.

Writing it all down was purging. Putting those stories on paper took them out of the nightmare realm and made me almost love myself for being able to finally face them. More subtly, it gave me a way to love the people I wrote about—even the ones I had fought with or hated.

Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences.

I wrote you.' 'I didn't get it,' said Archie. 'I wrote Applegarth as well,' said Adam angrily. 'He didn't get it either. He's away for a day or two. Jesus,' said Archie, 'are ye not keen to come in? You must be fair wore out with all that writing.

I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction "from the woman's point of view." To such demands, one can only say "Go away and don't be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

And then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the silence between quarter- and quarter-chime.

O]ne can scarcely be frightened off writing what one wants to write for fear an obscure reviewer should patronise one on that account.

I say--I've thought of a good plot for a detective story. Really? Top--hole. You know, the sort that people bring out and say 'I've often thought of doing it myself, if only I could find time to sit down and write it.' I gather that sitting down is all that is necessary for producing masterpieces.

After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.

She had her image… and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.

Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.

nothing is more vulgar than a careful avoidance of beginning a letter with the first person singular)

A novelist couldn't possibly marry all the people from whom she wanted specialised information.

You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.' 'I'm afraid to try that, Peter. It might go too near the bone.' 'It might be the wisest thing you could do.' 'Write it out and get rid of it?' 'Yes.' 'I'll think about that. It would hurt like hell.' 'What would that matter, if it made a good book?

Then, with many false starts and blank feet, returning and filling and erasing painfully as she went, she began to write again, knowing with a deep inner certainty that somehow, after long and bitter wandering, she was once more in her own place. Here, then, at home …