Quotes About Writing

Writing does for me what you got in that glass does for you. If I can write about it, I can understand it. And I can put it in the ground. That's all I want to do.

until after we publish.

Lastly, special thanks to Raymond Chandler for inspiring the title of the book. Describing in 1950 the time and place from which he drew his early crime stories, Chandler wrote, "The streets were dark with something more than night." Sometimes they still are.

I'm only a few years behind you," she said. "It will happen to me." "No, you'll be fine," Bosch said. "Your job is telling stories. Stories will always need to be told.

With the money from the legal settlement, he hires a beautiful young woman from the local university to type for him as he orally composes the sentences. But soon he realizes she is editing and rewriting what he tells her before she even types it in. And what dawns on him is that she is the better writer. Soon he sits mute in the room while she writes. He only watches. He wants to kill her, strangle her with his hands. But he can't move his hands to do it. He is in hell.

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

Books aren't written, they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it...

I wanted to be a writer, that's all. I wanted to write about it all. Everything that happens in a moment. The way the flowers looked when you carried them in your arms. This towel, how it smells, how it feels, this thread. All our feelings, yours and mine. The history of it, who we once were. Everything in the world. Everything all mixed up, like it's all mixed up now.

Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen and follow it with her hand as it moves across the paper; she may pick up her pen and find she's merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen, afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea about where to begin or what to write. She picks up her pen

It seems good enough; parts seem very good indeed. She has lavish hopes, of course—she wants this to be her best book, the one that finally matches her expectations.

She will write and write. She will finish this book, then write another. She will remain sane and she will live as she was meant to live, richly and deeply, among others of her kind, in full possession and command of her gifts.

As most writers know, it's one of the greatest feelings. It's rare and horribly elusive but every now and then, there it is, where you know what to do next and you make something. There's nothing to compare it to."-Michael Cunningham

if you are given lined paper, write crosswise. At least occassionally.

On any given day I'm likely to be working here at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences—or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles. --Going, Going, Gone

A writer's greatest challenge, though, is tone. I like a piece to sound as if it were dashed off in 15 minutes -- even when hours might have been spent in contriving just the right degree of airiness and nonchalance.

Es ist komisch. Es gibt einen Moment, wo man mit seinen Figuren nicht mehr machen kann, was man will, wo die eine Art Eigenleben kriegen und man eigentlich nur noch hinter ihnen hinterherschreiben muss. Und das ist ein gutes Zeichen, wenn dieser Punkt erreicht ist. Weil das heißt, dass die Figur wirklich ein Leben gekriegt hat.

Tutto ciò che accade tu lo scrivi disse. Tutto ciò che io scrive, accade fu la risposta.

Agatha says that, nowadays, things that people have just written can be almost as valuable as pictures they've painted.

The ecstasy of creation is when, as an artist, you are one with and totally absorbed in the act. It is the same experience whether it is the act of painting, making music, or writing. The experience really obliterates all other considerations at that moment. The act of re-creating the visual experience o the models in front of me is absolutely absorbing, leaving no room for extraneous thoughts, sexual or otherwise. My routine is my way of controlling hysteria.

I am a commercial writer and I'm proud of that. I am writing things to be put in the bookstore next month. I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.

I was a distant father. I'd just go off and write. I did the thing that screws up kids more than anything else in America. I went and got myself a little bit famous.

I could write 15,000 words a day and gave myself three days a volume.

Dont pretend. Tell you tale. Speak with your own voice. We are what we write, I think, even more than we are what we read.

If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.