Quotes About Writing

By the time writing was invented, the Greeks and Egyptians had already learned to extract opium from poppies to facilitate sleep.

I've always loved books. I was an avid reader, with any number of my own stories rolling around in my head. Writing them down seemed a logical step.

Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big. The entire process is beyond intoxicating.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself!

I also know that not everyone will like what I do, and that there are many people who do love my work, and so I write for them, and for my own pleasure, and try not to brood too much over those who have different tastes. And I have written enough books now that I know the self-doubt and the anxiety are part of the creative process, and drive me to keep trying to do better, and keep me from becoming too cocksure about my writing, which is a form of creative death.

Girl next to me at the baggage counter said she wrote her way to liberation. How did you handle first person narrative, I asked her. And said she knew the hole of depression, had been there. But I am out now, I escaped, I told her. 'You will fall into it again,' she said. Already I was sliding.

For me it's also - the music is equally as important. I mean I think as somebody who writes music, there just has to sort of be the marriage between both.

I practiced writing in every possible way that I could. I wrote a pastiche of other people. Just as a pianist runs his scales for ten years before he gives his concert: because when he gives that concert, he can't be thinking of his fingering or of his hands, he has to be thinking of his interpretation. He's thinking of what he's trying to communicate.

The two most dangerous words in the English language are 'like' and 'as.' If you do not have something interesting to say after you write down those two words, cross them out, because you've entered into the country of cliché. Make sure you have something to say that is new or fresh or in a different way; otherwise, leave them alone.

My body was telling me to rest the old machine for a while. Every afternoon about six o'clock I watched The Waltons, to try to heal myself just to get back what human kindness looked like. It was tonic for my soul. That seems so hokey, but that's what I needed right then—hokeyness—some blessed way of living. I was still writing the book somehow, I was drinking too much, and I would await these phone calls from Lenore with dread, just absolute dread.

But I think everybody should write. I think those people with stories who don't write should be stomped on.

Woodenly written, ineptly footnoted. It was so bad it was starting to make Connie angry. There often came a moment in grading when Connie struggled with anger at her students. That was usually when it was time to stop for the night.

Nous nous répétons d'ailleurs d'un livre à l'autre, et parfois même d'un chapitre à l'autre, mais nous ne croyons pas devoir nous en excuser, étant donné les droits du souci de clarté.

Même si nos écrits n'avaient en moyenne pas d'autre résultat que la restitution, pour quelques-uns, de cette barque salvatrice qu'est la prière, nous devrions à Dieu de nous tenir pour profondément satisfait.

I'll never stop writing. It's one occupation in which being crazy, even senile, might help.

You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world.

Every man has one thing he can do better than anyone else--and usually it's reading his own handwriting.

After a time, Fogelin shifted into writing and editing manuals. Often lampooned, these texts, if studied with a fanaticism ordinarily reserved for the Bible, revealed a multitude of secrets.

Code writing was a solitary pursuit, but designing and fitting together diverse pieces demanded cooperation and compromise.

I do believe you would be perfectly happy shut up in your study with your rolls of manuscript all your life, without seeing another human being save a servant to bring you in bread and fruit and water twice a day.

You can declare at the very start that it's impossible to write a novel nowadays, but then, behind your back, so to speak, give birth to a whopper, a novel to end all novels.

Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.