WRITING QUOTES IV

quotations about writing

Writing quote

The interesting thing is that I rarely look at the outline once I've done it. And when I read the outline once I've written the novel, I realize I've written a totally different book.

JONATHAN KELLERMAN

"Novelist explains how psychology training honed his writing", USC News, February 25, 2016


There would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

MARKUS ZUSAK

The Book Thief

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There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

HURAKI MURAKAMI

Hear the Wind Sing

Tags: Haruki Murakami


It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères

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Writing is a profession you can practice while upside down and experiencing total blackout in a cave. You just use the mental recorder instead of pen and paper ... or portable ... and hope you find a use for the experience.

C. J. CHERRYH

interview, SFF World, January 1, 2000

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Cautious men have many adverbs, "usually," "nearly," "almost ": safe men begin, " it may be advanced " : you never know precisely what their premises are, nor what their conclusion is; they go tremulously like a timid rider; they turn hither and thither; they do not go straight across a subject, like a masterly mind.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

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Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

interview, The Telegraph, August 31, 2010


For me, writing is just a thing I need to do everyday, like breathing or eating.

GUY CAPECELATRO III

"Power of music shines in Capecelatro's heartfelt album", Seacoast Online, March 30, 2017


Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its power.

JOAN DIDION

Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations

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Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

"Furor Scribendi", Bloodchild and Other Stories

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To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.

GAO XINGJIAN

Nobel Lecture, 2000

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Writing by hand, mouthing by mouth: in each case you get a very strong physical sense of the emergence of language--squeezed out like a well-formed stool--what satisfaction! what bliss!

WILLIAM H. GASS

The Paris Review, summer 1977


I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.

JANE AUSTEN

letter to Cassandra Austen, October 26, 1813

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I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

"Q & A: Author Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Time, June 30, 2009

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Novices in the art attain to finish of diction and precision of portraiture before they can construct the plot.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

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The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing it well or you're doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That is actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

JOHN GREEN

"July 19: A Day in the Life of a Writer (Who Has No Friends)", YouTube


There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a sheet, as in riding across a country.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

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What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.

THOMAS WOLFE

Selections from the Works of Thomas Wolfe

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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


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

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