Quotes About Writing

During the writing process you're going to discover things about yourself you never knew. For example, if you're writing about something that happened to you, you may re-experience some old feelings and emotions. You may get 'wacky' and irritable and live each day as if you were on an emotional roller coaster. Don't worry. Just keep writing.

La cosa più difficile quando si scrive è sapere che cosa scrivere

What's great about writing a screenplay is that the subtext of the scene, what is not said, can sometimes be more important that what is said. Again, dialogue serves two basic functions in the scene: Either it moves the story forward or it reveals information about the character.

Before you write one shot, one word of dialogue on paper, you must know four things: your ending, your beginning, Plot Point I, and Plot Point II.

The hardest thing about writing is knowing what to write.

Many writers—and I read more than five hundred scripts a year—do not realize that a screenplay is a selling document. When they're writing a screenplay, they're not writing a movie. They're writing a script, material that's going to be read, not seen. And it's the reading experience that will determine whether the movie gets made or not.

Brevity in writing is what charity is to all other virtues — righteousness is nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other.

No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already.

There are millions of people who think that romance isn't real writing. But the only person who can make you real, make your books real, is you.

At this rate, I'd be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the problem was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to live in.

The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. --from Kindness, written 1 February 1963

Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

What do you have in mind after you graduate? What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. I don't really know, I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

I have done, this year, what I said I would: overcome my fear of facing a blank page day after day, acknowledging myself, in my deepest emotions, a writer, come what may.

Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: 'After a heavy rainfall, poems titled 'Rain' pour in from across the nation.

How could I write about life when I'd never had a love affair or a baby or seen anybody die?

Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.

Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible.

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality.

How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?

People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep.