Quotes About Writing

Jag förstod ingenting. Jag hade inte den blekaste aning. Jag ville mest bara tre saker. Bli fri, skriva få orgasm.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it has also become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it.

Le passé en lui-même est un très mauvais matériau pour la littérature. La littérature est un présent brûlant, non au sens journalistique, mais comme une aspiration à transcender le temps en une présence éternelle

We're a bunch of intellectuals who sit in the Atelier or in the Grillon and talk to each other. And when we write, we write for each other. We have absolutely no connection with the people.The people don't know we exist.

If I have a creed, this is it: My god is language, written and read. And there is no other god but this.

Later I wrote a composition that my grammar teacher Ohara Y?ichi praised as the best since the founding of Keika Middle School. But when I read it over now, it's precious and pretentious enough to make me blush.

And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that's funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there's all kinds of advantages to it.

she had that teacher who got her into her poetry. She even talked about applying to a writing program. But then it became clear that it was all just a crush on an older man. It was always about men for her.

Just as Plato wrote the Gorgias and Protagoras for the major sophists, we should write the Nietzsche and the Wittgenstein. And, for the minor sophists , the Vattimo and the Rorty. Neither more nor less polemical, neither more nor less respectful.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.

I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.

When a novelist has "something to say," they mean a message. It has political connotations, or a religious message, or a moral prescription. It means "commitment," as used by Sartre and other fellow-travelers. They are saying that the writer has a world view, a sort of truth that he wishes to communicate, and that his writing has an ulterior significance. I am against this.

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places.

Mark my words, when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.

she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

The Only Thing More Expensive Than Writing Software Is Writing Bad Software

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers.

I write early in the morning, usually after reading portions of at least half a dozen newspapers on the web.

Writing allows me the time to travel and see the world, which is what I always wanted to do. I'd really like to have been Sir Richard Francis Burton, but it's the wrong century.

The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing.

As I turned toward writing, which is partially intellectual in its function, but is primarily intuitive and emotional in its execution, I turned towards that which was numinous and emotional in me, and that was the legend of King Arthur Asleep Under the Hill. It stood for all that I'd had to give up in order to understand what I'd had to give up.

I had never given much credence to the phenomenon of "writer's block". I was more inclined to think of it as "writer's impatience", and to follow Arthur Koestler's dictum: "Soak; and wait.

I do not think consciously of children [when writing] … I do know that children read me more intelligently than adults do.

Writing means being a fascinated slave to current events.