Quotes About Writing

Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.

My muse has more projects on her wish list than I have hours in the day to write. #authorproblems

To be a writer you have to write -- and no academic degree is going to do the writing for you.

The heartbreak of having written and published a first book is that the world then expected you to write a second.

Writing was the antijob, the fuck you to all jobs, her claim on her autonomy, what kept her feral and free.

Don't you ever fucking write about me! Andy hollered, and was gone.

If you want to write, then write. If you want someone to give you MONEY for what you write, you must understand that you are in a BUSINESS relationship. Learn the BUSINESS of writing.

The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume: a hungry space I've somehow got to fill.

I'm so passionate about my writing, there's page-spunk pouring out of my fingertips.

The only answer a truly dedicated writer has to "What are your best books (or stories)?" is "My second best is the one I'm writing now, and my best is the one I'll be writing next.

It's a fiendishly difficult thing to do because paper that has been written on doesn't burn easily.

Na lito??, przecie? to zaczyna by? Å›mieszne, koniec koÅ"ców! - nie poddawaÅ' siÄ™ Korowiow. - Pisarz jest pisarzem, poniewa? pisze, a bynajmniej nie dlatego, ?e ma legitymacjÄ™.

A writer isn't a writer because he has a membership card but because he writes. How do you know what bright ideas may not be swarming in my head?

Manuscripts don't burn

Bulgakov began work on the first version of the novel early in 1929, or possibly at the end of 1928.

manuscripts don't burn.

Aren't there enough plays already? There are such lovely plays and so many of them. If you were to start playing them you couldn't get through them all in twenty years. Why do you want to write? It must be so upsetting!

Your membership cards, please, said the woman. This is really all rather funny! said Koroviev, refusing to give up. A writer isn't a writer because he has a membership card but because he writes. How do you know what bright ideas may not be swarming in my head? Or in his head? And he pointed at Behemoth's head. The cat removed its cap to give the woman a better look at its head. Stand back, please, she said, irritated.

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: - (1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities (2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; (3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life.

Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.

The entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout 'We are all writers!' For everyone is pained with the thought of disappearing, unheard, and unseen into an indifferent universe and because of that, everyone wants, wither there's still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.

One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far-off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding