Quotes About Writing

I will eviscerate you in fiction. Every pimple, every character flaw. I was naked for a day; you will be naked for eternity.

Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!

Drafts would be written out in his hunched cursive, the words growing fatter as his pencil dulled against the page.

All of us conceal in conversation clues to personality which we happily reveal on paper, because the added distance of writing lends protection and encourages the risks of intimacy.

learning is not the consequence of teaching or writing, but rather of thinking...so a playful, provocative, unclear but stimulating book could actually be more worth your money than a serious, clear book that tells you what to think but doesn't make you think.

One of the sad little secrets of the writing life is that it's become like the movie business, where a movie has to "open big"; if a book hasn't caught anybody's interest in the first two weeks of its life, it's not going to.

I regretted it. But it can't be avoided. A writer has to use everything he has. If you want to write, you have to be willing to be a son of a bitch sometimes.

But his life consisted, for the most part, of writing and reading. He wrote during the day, read at night, went to bed early, and did the same thing the next day.

You just sit down at the typewriter and follow the character around. It's like being a detective. You write page after page after page just finding out who they are. You wait for them to do something interesting.

He wanted to live without distractions; he wanted to focus all the life-force he had left on this last book. But now it was hard to concentrate. There was something new in his life. There was the painful distraction of desire.

Poorly written classes equal unhappy end users. That's not a happy equation.

en mi ficción intento poner límites al elemento disparate. Dragones, vampiros, duendes, espadas que cantan, etcétera, no tienen cabida en ella. Pese a todas mis aspiraciones a la locura, persiste en mí una vieja veta racionalista.

The Elements of Programming Style (with P. J. Plauger)

I confess this is an unforeseen -- unforeseen and, indeed, I did not foresee it -- by-product of journaling: in writing down the facts of one's feelings, one might leave out facts, and one might also try to convince oneself that one's fantasy is, in fact, one's fact, or at least a fact among other facts, other facts that are, in fact, facts, making it most difficult to tell the fact from the fantasy.

Cixous implores women to write, to seize and make words their own, to take risks, to rid themselves of fear and caution, to open up the possibility of loving with all of themselves, not desiring the other through lack, but desiring all of the other with all of oneself. That one self is not a simple sum of her/his parts but a multiplication of difference.

The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed. Erskine

An assumption exists that long sentences are bad, but it is usually the case that bad sentences are long.

Sentences that bring ideas and images into clearer focus by adding more useful details and explanation are generally more effective than those that are less clearly focused and that offer fewer details.

Unless the situation demands otherwise, sentences that convey more information are more effective than those that convey less. Sentences

Strunk and White do a great job of reminding us to avoid needless words, but they don't begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might actually be needed. My goal will be to explain why, in many cases, we need to add words to improve our writing, as Faulkner so frequently does, rather than trying to pare our writing down to some kind of telegraphic minimum, as is frequently the case with Hemingway.

I'm trying to make the point that the basic unit of writing is the proposition, not the word or even a sequence of words, and we build sentences by putting propositions together.

I love the challenge of trying to tell a story with words, creating scenes that come alive in the reader's mind. I try to create something every day, even if it's just a few paragraphs.

If you don't like my book, write your own.... If you do like my novels, I commend your good taste.

You may write twenty lines one day--or even three like Euripides in three days--and a hundred lines in one more day--and yet on the hundred, may have been expended as much good work, as on the twenty and the three.