Quotes About Writing

no writing is a waste of time--no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.

The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person

That is why I hope you can keep up this continuity and sit for some time every day (if only for half hour, though two hours is better and five is remarkable and eight is bliss and transfiguration!) before your typewriter,- if not writing the just thoughtfully pulling your hair. (...) It takes an hour or two of vacant moodling, when nothing at all comes out on paper; and this is difficult always because it makes us (...) with our accomplishment-mania, feel uneasy and guilty.

It is our nasty twentieth-century materialism that makes us feel: what is the use of writing, painting, etc., unless one has an audience or gets cash for it? Socrates and the men of the Renaissance did so much because the rewards were intrinsic, i.e., the enlargement of the soul.

I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.

Why Women Who Do Too Much Housework Should Neglect It for Their Writing

I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time--no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something.

Ch X Title Why Women who do too much house work should neglect it for their writing

With every sentence you write, you have learned something.

I'm a drinker with writing problems.

An author's first duty is to let down his country.

Brenda Ueland, in her book If You Want to Write, writes of her own why: "At last I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them, if they cared to hear it. If they did not—fine.

Writing is like praying, because you stop all other activities, descend into silence, and listen patiently to the depths of your soul, waiting for true words to come. When they do, you thank God because you know the words are a gift, and you write them down as honestly and cleanly as you can.

I keep thinking of the gifts of my own upbringing, which I once took for granted: I can read any book I choose and comprehend it. I can write a complete sentence and punctuate it correctly. If I need help, I can call on judges, attorneys, educators, ministers. I wonder what I would be like if I had grown up without such protections and supports. What cracks would have turned up in my character?

I despair of ever getting it through anybody's head I am not interested in bookshops, I am interested in what's written in the books. I don't browse in bookshops, I browse in libraries, where you can take a book home and read it, and if you like it you go to a bookshop and buy it.

With my pen I will rule the world. You'll see, they'll call me the scourge of princes.

My style might seem awkward, but I'm only trying to write down the things in the scene that I think the reader should know.

Get black on white.

He had not known just how greatly he had been divided and separated because once he started to work he wrote from an inner core which could not be split nor even marked nor scratched. He knew about this and it was his strength since all the rest of him could be riven.

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

I knew I must write a novel. But it seemed an impossible thing to do when I had been trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made a novel. It was necessary to write longer stories now as you would train for a longer race.

My favorite quotes; "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector." - Ernst Hemingway. "We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master." Ernest Hemingway

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.

But, you say, there is very little conversation in this book. Why isn't there more dialoge? What we want in a book by this citizen is people talking; that is all he knows how to do and now he doesn't do it. The fellow is no philosopher, no savant, an incompetent zoologist, he drinks too much and cannot punctuate readily and now he has stopped writing dialogue. Some one ought to put a stop to him. He is bull crazy.