Quotes About Writing

Every long sentence can be broken up into shorter ones, and if you don't know how—if you don't see within your long sentences groupings of simple, clear ideas—it will show.

Subordinating conjunctions are a much larger set. They include after, although, as, because, before, if, since, than, though, unless, until, when, and while.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

I try to use words, whether in prose or poetry, that people can understand, that make them feel in an intense way. I'm a writer, that's what I do.

For someone who writes as slowly as I do, each installment is a full day's work. Newspaper novels are painful... Whether I like what I'm writing or not, whether I'm feeling inspired or not, I have to write an installment every day.

The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever. It's a start, you say to the room. ...In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace-- and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a bady's beshattered diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

The only thing that came close was how he felt about his books; only the combined love he had for everything he'd read and everything he hoped to write came even close.

What he used to feel for those girls he'd never really known was nothing compared to the amor he was carrying in his heart for Ana. It had the density of a dwarf-motherfucking-star and at times he was a hundred percent sure it would drive him mad. The only thing that came close was how he felt about books; only the combined love he had for everything he'd read and everything he hoped to write came even close.

Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby's beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently benutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.

I'll give you what I've managed to unearth and the rest will have to wait for the day the páginas en blanco finally speak.

I've never written a movie, I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.

One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.

I tend to start at 9 o'clock in the morning and write until 3. Those are my best hours. They fit the other rhythms of the world. So I write for six hours, pretty much without any breaks.

Although Kurt Vonnegut may not be considered a humor writer, 'Breakfast of Champions' is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

I believe it's incredibly important to write against [racial] stereotypes. If we give in and make sure that all black women characters are asexual, gentle, and kind we wind up with another set of stereotypes.

An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many, and grows old in their sick hearts.

It is hard not to write satire.

If nature refuses, indignation will produce verses.

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.

la hora donde el lector se enamora del autor y de los personajes de sus libros y donde el redactor de versos imagina que está hablando con algún dios o que está escribiendo para lectores poseídos por el demonio cruel de la poesía. En

El libro de ensayos sobre la narrativa de Juan García Ponce que venía escribiendo hacía casi un año

Se le ocurrió que si la escritura no se hacía de esa manera, en un estado de embriaguez física o espiritual, entonces no valía la pena de ser ejecutada (y la palabra misma le hizo sonreír). Sabía que lo que estaba haciendo jamás podría llegar a ser considerado como una novela por un editor o por un agente literario.