quotations about writing
I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool--and I'm not any of those--to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.
MAYA ANGELOU
The Paris Review, fall 1990
You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
ANITA BROOKNER
attributed, Journal for You, 2003
Writing is always a rough translation from wordlessness into words.
CHARLES SIMIC
attributed, Stealing Glimpses: Of Poetry, Poets, and Things in Between
I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession.... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life. And I didn't question if I should -- I just kept sharpening the pencils!
MARY OLIVER
The Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 1992
Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.
PHILIP ROTH
"My Life as a Writer", New York Times, March 2, 2014
What people who don't write don't understand is that they think you make up the line consciously -- but you don't. It proceeds from your unconscious. So it's the same surprise to you when it emerges as it is to the audience when the comic says it. I don't think of the joke and then say it. I say it and then realize what I've said. And I laugh at it, because I'm hearing it for the first time myself.
WOODY ALLEN
Esquire, September 2013
I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
SHANNON HALE
attributed, The Novel-Writing Plan
You want to be a writer? Good for you. So does that guy. And that girl. And him. And her. And that old dude. And that young broad. And your neighbor. And your mailman. And that Chihuahua. And that copy machine. Ahead of you is an ocean of wannabe ink slaves and word earners. I don't say this to daunt you. Or to be dismissive. But you have to differentiate yourself, and the way you do that is by doing rather than pretending.
CHUCK WENDIG
The Kick-Ass Writer
[Writing is] hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
JOAN DIDION
The Paris Review, fall-winter 1978
You know, many writers really don't like to write. I think this the chief complaint of so many. They hate to write; they do it under the compulsion that makes any artist the victim he is, but they loathe the process of sitting down trying to turn thoughts into reasonable sentences.
HARPER LEE
interview with Roy Newquist, Counterpoints, 1964
In order to write the novel I'm committed to, I have to pretend that it's not only separate from everything I've written before, but also separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has written. This is a grotesque delusion and a crass vanity, but also a creative necessity.
JULIAN BARNES
The Paris Review, winter 2000
Many writers-in-waiting spend a lot of time avoiding the work at hand. The most common way to avoid writing is by procrastination. This is the writer's greatest enemy. There is little to say about it except that once you decide to write every day, you must make yourself sit at the desk or table for the required period whether or not you are putting down words. Make yourself take the time even if the hours seem fruitless. Ideally, after a few days or weeks of being chained to the desk, you will submit to the story that must be told.
WALTER MOSLEY
This Year You Write Your Novel
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Answers to Nine Questions
Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process -- it is, after all, black magic, and may lose its power if we look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.
EDWARD ALBEE
introduction, Three Tall Women
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.
MARK TWAIN
"How to Tell a Story"
What I do as a writer, I work with situations, characters, certain situations and characters that appeal to me. And then, I try to imagine them and write the story that seems to flow from them. At a certain point, I can realize the themes are merging from this. But I never start from a thematic point of view, that I'm going to write about reinvention of self, identity, or any of these things. Usually, after the book is finished and I start talking about it, that it becomes analytical in that way. And in some ways it's a distortion of what the process has been, writing the book.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
interview, 3 AM Magazine
Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
There are two kinds of characters in all fiction, the born and the synthetic. If the writer has to ask himself questions -- is he tall, is he short? -- he had better quit.
REX STOUT
The New York Times, November 15, 1953
Some writers love to boast that they can write anywhere: in a cafe, in a park -- some can probably write underwater in a cage with sharks circling. But again it smacks of the cultivated self-image. JK Rowling writing in a café with a baby = potential mythology? Hemingway famously claimed that he could create anywhere, explaining, "the only good place to work is your head" -- but we all know what he did to his head in the end.
ROSEMARY JENKINSON
"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017
When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
GAO XINGJIAN
Dialogue and Rebuttal