Quotes About Writing

Could mere scribblings on parchment unmake a person's moral fiber?

What were her abilities? She played the pianoforte passably well even though it didn't interest her. She loved to read and could spend the rest of her life in a library. She'd written a book, and her imagination was such that she could transport herself from the wilds of Scotland to anywhere.

I love weird or funny or beautiful sentences Joy Williams could write a microwave-oven manual and I'm sure I'd love it, because the sentences would be tuned up like music.

Words, I guess, are her more durable artifacts.

Wait, that's your idea? That's your expert advice? You're going to tell these novelists to just keep going? You're going to tell these honest, earnest writers: You gotta have faith? Those are George Michael lyrics, asshole. If they wanted that pep talk, they could just hang out inside a mall elevator.

Mixed metaphors with two source domains that don't make sense together, […] are the structures that most deserve the name 'mixed metaphors'.

The fact that metaphors can sleep and wake is both bad news and good news for speakers and writers who want to avoid mixed metaphors. The bad news is that when a metaphoric word or phrase is sleeping for us, we probably won't notice if we use the word or phrase in ways that are inconsistent with its source-domain meaning.

I left my job in the fall, and now I can set my life up around writing instead of squeezing writing into my day it's amazing to have that time, and I feel very lucky.

As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat ' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of beautiful writing and suspenseful storytelling.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.

I can write all the way through the morning, when my mind is clear, and there are no distractions.

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.

Kirjailijan ammatissa parasta on se, ettei tapaa uusia ihmisiä.

I haven't even read everything I wrote.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time writing essays.

Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.

There are two kinds of writers. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.

Antoinette Watkins found that writing helped defuse conflicts and increased her ability to discuss them. WHEN I BECAME TERRIBLY upset, I would sit down and write long letters to my husband, put them aside, read them the next day—and then throw them away. But it was a good idea to write it out. I think the big thing is to vent these things out of yourself, and you can do that in many ways. I found that writing helped.

Learning to read, and to a lesser degree, to write, are of course the major events in one's intellectual development. There is nothing to compare with it, since very few people (Helen Keller is the great exception) can remember what it meant for them to learn to speak.

An ancient sage held that in different ages, humans held the senses in different ratios, according to the media by which they communicated and expressed themselves. Hence before writing, the ear was the royal sense. After writing, the eye.