Quotes About Writing

Prose is walking; poetry is flying

At the height of the Cultural Revolution, rather than risk having to face dire consequences for his accumulated writings, he burned several kilos of manuscripts (ten plays, and many short stories, poems, and essays). For him it was an ordeal to part with what he had written. Moreover, it took a long time to burn so much paper without creating smoke and arousing suspicions.

I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal, because if you lose it, then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal, but I always write everything down... Anytime I travel, I try and fill up notepads.

God writes a lot of comedy the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

My main objective in writing is to open the minds of my readers, to say 'the world can be a wonderful place - its possibilities are open to you and your imagination'.

Those who wrote down their goals were 39.5 percent more likely to accomplish them.

If you write well and honestly, with character rising from background and action springing from character, and if you remain true to your vision of life, then theme will emerge in the reading process. And if you write what you believe, and only what you believe, the theme will inevitably be consistent.

Though the daily paper contains much that is swill, it also contains some good writing. From it you can learn to write leanly, you can learn to get to the point, and you can learn to compress several facts into a single clear sentence.

Someone once said that if you steal from one writer, it's called plagiarism, but if you steal from several, it's called research. So steal from everybody, but steal only a sentence or a phrase at a time. If you use much more than that, you must get permission and then give credit.

To write is not necessary to communicate. Communication occur in the mind of the reader.

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

Writing is] a trade [or]...a means of livelihood. You pass your imagination through the ink bottle, and it comes out in the shape of bread and meat, coats and shoes. [Julian Hawthorne]

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.

I was the first Chicano to write in complete sentences.

How hard is the destiny of a maker of books! He has to cut and sew up in order to make ideas follow logically. But when one writes a book on reverie, has the time not come to let the pen run, to let reverie speak, and better yet to dream the reverie at the same time one believes he is transcribing it?

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

I'm going to write a book about the South. I'm going to call it When Beautiful Places Happen to Bad People.

Who in the hell was Halliday? Just a guy from out of town who'd written a few bad mystery novels. Really a has-been. Still trying to ride along on the hard-boiled stuff that had gone out of favor with the old Black Mask.

History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this.

some of history's lessons here with respect to writing should be obvious: make a copy; back up your data; and beware of invaders.

I want to travel with an affinity that is discreet, diverse, loosely convened but moving with purpose. I want each book I write to be an affinity of sorts, and within it each essay or fragment in turn an affinity of ideas, images, moods and citations. It is not enough to want this—you have to perform it, and one of the perils of writing is that I may only describe my affinity, and fail to embody it.

I don't think that writing, real writing, has much to do with affirming belief--if anything it causes rifts and gaps in belief which make belief more complex and more textured, more real. Good writing unsettles, destroys both the author and the reader. From my perspective, there always has to be a tension between the writer and the monolithic elements of the culture, such as religion.