Quotes About Writing

There is no lonelier man than a writer when he's writing, except the suicide.

When George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway what the best training for an aspiring writer would be in a 1954 interview, Hem replied, "Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

He dedicado mucho tiempo de mi vida a los crímenes y a las investigaciones de los mismos. Mi planteamiento es que el mal siempre es fruto de las circunstancias, nunca es congénito. He escrito sobre crímenes porque ilustran mejor que ninguna otra cosa las contradicciones que constituyen la base de la vida humana.

Letters...People do not write the truth; they write the things that, they believe, you would like to read.

He took a sheet of paper out of a desk drawer. But what would he write? The day's work had hardly involved more than collecting a large number of question marks.

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.

Your way of being present to your community may require times of absence, prayer, writing, or solitude. These too are times for your community.

People who read your ideas tend to think that your writings reflect your life.

Overheard at O'Banion's Beer Emporium: Pardon me, darlin', but I'm writin' a telephone book. C'n I have yer number?

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

The poet writes the history of his own body.

The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with his experiences. He does not make books out of books, but he has been there in person.

Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you'll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you'll be in as much trouble as I am!

Hard and steady and engrossing labor with the hands, especially out of doors, is invaluable to the literary man and serves him directly.

Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day.

In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.

Good writing as well as good acting will be obedience to conscience. There must not be a particle of will or whim mixed with it. If we can listen, we shall hear. By reverently listening to the inner voice, we may reinstate ourselves on the pinnacle of humanity.

The written word is the choicest of relics.

Thoreau thought obsessively about time and the various ways it could be manipulated by writing; he collapses the two years he spent at Walden into one for the sake of "convenience," but surely also for the sake of artistry.

Happiness writes in white ink on a white page.

Happiness writes white.

Good writers will, indeed, do well to imitate the ingenious traveller in this instance, who always proportions his stay at any place to the beauties, elegancies, and curiosities which it affords.

for as I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein.