Quotes About Writing

1975 was International Women's Year. I had never heard the word 'feminism' before then. I was writing my books from the experiences of my own life and from watching and studying the lives of those around me in general. I did not know that writing the way I was, was putting me into a special category. I had the first inkling of it on 28 June 1975 when the International Women's League invited me to give a speech.

Untuk menjadi penulis berhasil, menulislah setiap hari entah kau menginginkannya atau tidak.

When you speak, your words echo only across the room or down the hall. but when you write, your words echo down the ages.

Nize baby, et op all de screenplay.

It would be better not to know how to write. Then one would not have to sign death sentences."16

You write what you know because -- like there's another choice? The trick is to try and know as much as possible.

One of the best things about writing is how it redeems, not to mention recycles, all of one's prior experiences, including -- or perhaps especially -- the failures.

I wouldn't be lying. I'd just be editing my report for length.

My husbands hated it when I wrote cos I used to kill myself laughing. I was so funny. They couldn't stand that it was so easy for me. Cosmo says I wrote in a trance. I'd sit down, black out and an hour or so later two-and-a-half thousand words would be there.

Writing is more than anything a compulsion, like some people wash their hands thirty times a day for fear of awful consequences if they do not. It pays a whole lot better than this type of compulsion, but it is no more heroic.

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms!

Aucun volume gros et durable ne pourra jamais être écrit sur la puce ; bien que beaucoup s'y soient essayés

My cheek blanches white while I write; I start at the scratch of my pen; my own mad brood of eagles devours me; fain would I unsay this audacity; but an iron-mailed hand clenches mine in a vice, and prints down every letter in my spite.

What's the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book. Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.

Judd sighed. I don't know why people take criticism so seriously. One good creator is worth all the critics who ever lived. Criticism is necessary to literature, Hawke said, and felt a fierce disgust with himself. It was as though he were trying to soothe a homicidal lunatic. Judd said, Nonsense, criticism is a minor form of entertainment, a sort of piggy-back writing that rides on other men's work.

My mind seemed to think in terms of very bad song lyrics these days.

But anyhow, when you take up your pen you do something devilish pleasing: there is a prospect before you. You are going to develop a germ: I don't know what it is, and I promise you I won't call it creation—but possibly a god is creating through you, and at least you are making believe at creation. Anyhow, it is a sense of mastery and of origin, and you know that when you have done, something will be added to the world, and little destroyed.

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing.

To begin at the beginning is, next to ending at the end, the whole art of writing; as for the middle you may fill it in with any rubble that you choose.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

Writing feels safer somehow. I can catch myself before I say the wrong thing.

Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane

?injenica je da sam jedinstven. Ne zanima me šta jedan ?ovek može saopštiti drugim ljudima, kao i onaj filozof ja smatram da se veštinom pisanja ništa ne može preneti. Za dosadne i proste sitnice nema mesta u mome duhu, koji je predodre?en za velike stvari.