Quotes About Writing

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

T.S. Eliot said to me "There's only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by reading other poetry aloud – and it doesn't matter whether he understands it or not (i.e. even if it's in another language.) What matters above all, is educating the ear.

And the poet who fears to take the risk that what he writes may turn out not to be poetry at all, is a man who has surely failed, who ought to have adopted a less adventurous vocation

A piece of writing is a trap and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive—which is knowledge—alive forever.

Literacy isn't just about reading, writing, and comprehension. It's about culture, professionalism, and social outlook.

But writing and language can do more than just program you. It can manifest reality, as Burroughs explores in his own writing. Burroughs suggests that the act of writing manifests reality because writing manifests the future.

Eating and sleeping are the two periods in your life where writers get a pass for not reading. Check that. Only sleeping.

There's different ways to be impacted by truth. One is to read the scriptures. Another is to read other works by other people who have read the scriptures, non fiction for example. Another is to do studies. Another is to go to a place of worship. Another thing is to sit and listen to someone who's speaking. There's all kinds of ways. Another way is to write. About the truth. Discover the struggle through your character.

Your journal pages. Your effort to cry words

There is no correct way to write a novel, or rather, there is only one, and that one way is to make it interesting. That is very easily said, but how do you make your writing interesting? The answer to the question is, that you write interestingly only about the things that genuinely interest you. This is an infallible rule.

The lawn lay like the pristine waiting page Of a prison report. Who would write what upon it I never gave a thought. A dumb creature, looping at the furnace door On its demon's prong, Was a pen already writing Wrong is right, right wrong.

In writing these poems about relatives, I found it almost impossible to write about the mother. I was stuck. My feelings about my mother, you see, must be too complicated to easily flow into words.

I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

I say I write to you, but, truth be told, I prefer the American idiom: I write you. I'll write you friends say, as if, in writing, someone could be caused to appear, as if writing were a spell, some form of conjuration. So, I write you to bring you here, bring you back.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

I know this is going to sound corny, but I love my life. I love my baby, so I love getting to wake up with him. And I have the most amazing job, with writing that any actor would love and costars who I can't wait to see on Monday mornings. And I love coming home to my husband.

Writing is a solitary occupation, and we like it that way.

I'm never lonely when I'm writing, because you live with the characters that are so alive in your mind. And you really see them and know them and get to be friends with them.

Whose book is it anyway? The hardest thing a writer has to learn is that once you publish a book, it's no longer truly yours – even though it's got your name on the front and it lives inside you. It belongs to the readers now. All you can do is steel yourself as you push it out into the world, stay gracious, and get busy with the next one.