quotations about writing
There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a sheet, as in riding across a country.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.
DON DELILLO
Conversations with Don DeLillo
One of the things that writers very quickly learn to avoid is talking their work away. Talking about your work hardens it prematurely, and weakens the charge. You need to keep a fluid sense of the work in hand--it has to be able to change almost without your being aware that it's changing.
TOBIAS WOLFF
The Paris Review, fall 2004
It was not a choice of writing or not writing. It was a choice of loving my life or not loving my life. To keep writing was always a first priority.... I worked probably 25 years by myself.... Just writing and working, not trying to publish much. Not giving readings. A longer time than people really are willing to commit before they want to go public.
MARY OLIVER
The Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 1992
A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere -- even in prison.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Atlantic, October 15, 1997
I'm grateful when stories come in a rush, although I keep an eye on them afterwards, to see whether they hold together. It's harder to judge the ones that took so long to finish. With those, I've lost perspective. Mostly I'm just glad that I can be done with them.
KELLY LINK
"Words by Flashlight", Sybil's Garage, June 7, 2006
I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.
TANITH LEE
Realms of Fantasy, August 2009
But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don't choose what kind of story it is or what's going to happen. I just wait.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Paris Review, summer 2004
To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
To me, writing is not a profession. You might as well call living a profession. Or having children. Anything you can't help doing.
VICKI BAUM
I Know What I'm Worth
For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint concept, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
I will agree that inspired writing is liquid gold when it comes to getting our words on paper. However, only writing when one feels inspired is a quick way to produce little to no content. If we waited to exercise only when we felt inspired we likely wouldn't be getting much movement. When something isn't habit those feelings of inspiration start coming further and further in between.
DANIELLE SABRINA
"5 Habits Holding You Back From Creating Great Content", Huffington Post, February 29, 2016
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.
ANN BEATTIE
Conversations with Ann Beattie
For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really.... I keep it out of print.
MORDECAI RICHLER
interview, Brick 81, 1989
Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.
TOBSHA LEARNER
interview, Booktopia, February 22, 2011
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A Moveable Feast
Each book starts from ashes.
PHILIP ROTH
interview with Cynthia Haven, "The Book Haven"