quotations about writing
You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer--history shows it's better if you're not--but you have to understand your badness.
PETER ABRAHAMS
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End of Story
Ideas are infinite--writers are hardwired to think that way. We keep it fresh by using new people, mixing character types and putting them in a different setting. It's always the first book all over again, but one idea can be told a thousand different ways. There are 88 keys on the piano, but you can make an infinite amount of music from those keys.
NORA ROBERTS
Time Magazine, November 29, 2007
To turn experience into speech -- that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it -- is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking.
JOHN BARTH
The End of the Road
To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
KURT VONNEGUT
attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations
I don't think it is worth explaining how a character's nose or chin looks. It is my feeling that readers will prefer to construct, little by little, their own character--the author will do well to entrust the reader with this part of the work.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
The Paris Review, winter 1998
Writers in this country, particularly novelists, are likely to come to the medium through some back door. Nearly every writer I know was going to be something else, and then found himself writing by a kind of passionate default.
JOHN BARTH
The Paris Review, spring 1985
I want to be a writer you can always depend on for a good read during your vacation, during your flight, during a time in your life when you want to forget the world around you. The nicest notes I've received from readers are those that tell me I've gotten them back into reading for entertainment. For me, there is no greater compliment.
JEFF ABBOTT
Publisher's Weekly, May 30, 2011
When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?
DAVID SEDARIS
Oasis Magazine, June 2008
I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.
TANITH LEE
Realms of Fantasy, August 2009
When a good writer is having fun, the audience is almost always having fun too.
STEPHEN KING
Entertainment Weekly, August 17, 2007
A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
SAUL BELLOW
attributed, The Hidden Writer
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
Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
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
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"The Art of Metaphor"
There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
HURAKI MURAKAMI
Hear the Wind Sing
I tend to write things seven times before I show them to my editor. I write them seven times, then I take them on tour, read them like a dozen times on tour, then go back to the room and rewrite, read and rewrite, and I try to learn as much as I can on my own before I show it to my editor at The New Yorker. I would never show him a first draft, because then he's really going to be sick of it by the twelfth draft.
DAVID SEDARIS
Oasis Magazine, June 2008
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don't believe it, but for the purposes of this argument, let's say it's so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words. This is why we type a line or two and then hit the delete button or crumple up the page. Certainly that was not what I meant to say! That does not represent what I see. Maybe I should try again another time. Maybe the muse has stepped out back for a smoke. Maybe I have writer's block. Maybe I'm an idiot and was never meant to write at all.
ANN PATCHETT
The Getaway Car