quotations about writing
You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.
KIRBY LARSON
interview, Author Turf, March 6, 2014
I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
MARTIN AMIS
The Paris Review, spring 1998
There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape.... The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
I write from a thorough conviction that it is the duty of me, and with the belief that, after every drawback and shortcoming, I do my best, all things considered--that is for me, and, so being, the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope, in nowise affect me.
ROBERT BROWNING
letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 11, 1845
While I am writing, the sea's roar is coming up to me, and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once.
THOMAS MANN
Tonio Kröger
The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating, discovering. The journey is your narrative.
WALTER MOSLEY
This Year You Write Your Novel
I don't begin a novel with a shopping list--the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It's like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn't a violin. That's what I do when I'm writing a novel, except somehow I'm simultaneously generating the wood as I'm carving it.
WILLIAM GIBSON
The Paris Review, summer 2011
With films, I just scribble a couple of notes for a scene. You don't have to do any writing at all, you just have your notes for the scene, which are written with the actors and the camera in mind. The actual script is a necessity for casting and budgeting, but the end product often doesn't bear much resemblance to the script--at least in my case.
WOODY ALLEN
The Paris Review, fall 1995
Writing, in whatever form, is your own personal progress report. There's nothing I love more than curling up with tea and reading back over my past, error-riddled posts. It's an indescribable connection that you simply can't get from a photo or memory alone. Think of it as the only true insight your future self has into you, as you are today. Blog for yourself and the rest will follow.
BIANCA BASS
"Why You Should Write (Even If It Feels Like Nobody Is Listening)", Huffington Post, February 29, 2016
Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse
When I was teaching -- I taught for a while -- my students would write as if they were raised by wolves. Or raised on the streets. They were middle-class kids and they were ashamed of their background. They felt like unless they grew up in poverty, they had nothing to write about. Which was interesting because I had always thought that poor people were the ones who were ashamed. But it's not. It's middle-class people who are ashamed of their lives. And it doesn't really matter what your life was like, you can write about anything. It's just the writing of it that is the challenge. I felt sorry for these kids, that they thought that their whole past was absolutely worthless because it was less than remarkable.
DAVID SEDARIS
January Magazine, June 2000
Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past--it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases.
JOHN ASHBERY
interview, The Paris Review, winter 1983
A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, The Twilight and Other Zones
Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
Writer's block is only a failure of the ego.
NORMAN MAILER
attributed, A Writer's Time
I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously--that I'm seeing it in one flash. But in the working-out, the writing-out, infinite surprises happen. Thank God, because the surprise, the twist, the phrase that comes at the right moment out of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, that joyful little push that keeps a writer going.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1957
Writing is a kind of centering, a kind of meditation. I find it to be profoundly rewarding. Actually, I'm an addict. If I go too long, and so far that hasn't been longer than a week, I start to feel unsettled, nervous. I begin to feel that I'm not engaged, a disconnection is threatening my world, that I'm being passed by and I'm both failing myself and the world by not writing about it.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
The chief advantage that ancient writers can boast over modern ones, seems owing to simplicity. Every noble truth and sentiment was expressed by the former in the natural manner; in word and phrase, simple, perspicuous, and incapable of improvement. What then remained for later writers but affectation, witticism, and conceit?
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners