Quotes About Writing

...writing with ferocity is a gift, provided that ferocity is a monomaniacal devotion to pursuing the truth ...

Prose lies its way to the truth

Sure, I am funny and have a good sense of humor. Mostly, though, I just tell the truth. The internal dialogue people have in their heads - I just write it.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

There is no revelation in my words. I am merely stating what others have forgotten to write down.

The truth is I'm not really interested in travel writing as it's generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing.

When they have discovered truth in nature they fling it into a book, where it is even worse hands.

For authors, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line only if you are writing the letter I.

it was a phrase, it had power, I had this riff. To me, that's just sort of the alchemy of writing songs.

There was such a hullabaloo going on it was difficult to write up the notes in his scrapbook.

I write it, you read it, we share the joy.

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at ever conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbours soundly sleep.

She was a junkie for the printed word. And lucky for me, I manufactured her drug of choice.

That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.

Maybe the midnight disease was like that, too. After a while you lost the ability to distinguish between your fictional and actual words; you confused yourself with your characters, and the random happenings of your life with the machinations of a plot.

When I read these words I saw at once a connection to my own work. Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

I saw that I could write ten thousand more pages of shimmering prose and still be nothing but a blind minotaur stumbling along broken ground, an unsuccessful, overweight ex-wonder boy with a pot habit and a dead dog in the trunk of my car.

Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about things that really happened to me, about things that I really did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel, or embarrassing thoughts that I have at one time or another entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind that have no real basis in my life at all, but which, I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when they read what I have written.

I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I'm not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern.

this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood Normal Time in New California Writing

Paper." "What kind of paper? What for?" "A letter." "Business? Personal? This is for you? You're going to write a letter?" "Yes, sir." "Well, what kind of a letter is it?" Tommy considered the question for a moment, seriously. He didn't want to get the wrong kind of paper. "A death threat," he said at last.

Michael Chabon

Cuando le preguntaron qué era la cosa más terrorífica con la que se había encontrando, repuso: Un folio en blanco.

The art of sports writing always amazed me. Nine out of ten times the reader already knows the outcome of your story before reading it. They know who won, they probably even watched the game. But they read about it anyway and you have to find a way to write with an insight and angle that makes it seem fresh.