quotations about writing
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The Paris Review, spring 1958
Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
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
Irish English is a very different beast from English English or American English. Very different. The way in which Irish writers are only too happy to infuse their language with ambiguity is very different. An English writer will try to be clear. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass. The Irish writer would say: 'No no, it's a lens, it distorts everything.'
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
I've come to believe that a huge part of getting better at writing is forcing yourself to see the things that have been in the corner of your eye all along. That means writing stories that include characters from other cultures and backgrounds--but also, being more open to other viewpoints in general. It also means interrogating all of your other lazy ideas and drilling into all of the "of courses" that you let yourself get away with.
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
"The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do To Make Your Writing More Awesome", Gizmodo, February 25, 2016
I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything.
CHARLES DE LINT
interview with Kim Antieau, April 28, 2008
Every experience shapes your writing, being stuck in a car on a lonely bridge, or dancing at a prom, being the it girl on the beach, all of those things influence your life, they influence how you write, and the topics you choose to write about.
MAYA ANGELOU
Facebook post, October 13, 2012
A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
The Art of Writing
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
GRAHAM GREENE
Ways of Escape
Writing groups are the best things to happen to a writer since the invention of spell check. (I rely heavily on both so I would know.)
DASHA FAYVINOVA
"9 Reasons Joining A Writing Group Is One Of The Best Ways A Writer Can Grow", Bustle, February 8, 2016
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
Transitions are usually not that interesting. I use space breaks instead, and a lot of them. A space break makes a clean segue whereas some segues you try to write sound convenient, contrived. The white space sets off, underscores, the writing presented, and you have to be sure it deserves to be highlighted this way. If used honestly and not as a gimmick, these spaces can signify the way the mind really works, noting moments and assembling them in such a way that a kind of logic or pattern comes forward, until the accretion of moments forms a whole experience, observation, state of being. The connective tissue of a story is often the white space, which is not empty.
AMY HEMPEL
The Paris Review, summer 2003
There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
New York Times, November 23, 1941
The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
THOMAS MANN
Death in Venice
Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
"Furor Scribendi", Bloodchild and Other Stories
Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.
CONRAD AIKEN
interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968
It is the specialist's task to talk about means, about centimeters. An artist's task is to talk about the goal, about kilometers, thousands of kilometers. The organizing role of art consists of infecting the reader, of arousing him with pathos or irony -- the cathode and anode in literature. But irony that is measured in centimeters is pathetic, and centimeter-sized pathos is ridiculous. No one can be carried away by it. To stir the reader, the artist must speak not of means but of ends, of the great goal toward which mankind is moving.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Goal
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
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