quotations about writing
That's also part of having great editors -- they can sort of be honest with you and say, "I see where you're headed with this, but I don't think it's there yet. Dig deeper, babe, and come back with something more." And that's what you do, you dig waaaaaaaay down and you walk around the block eight million times and then you have it -- shazam! And it all comes together in something soooo much better than you thought you were capable of.
VICTORIA LAURIE
interview, Author's Den
I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, A. V. Club, June 17, 2011
To write is to act.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
Letters to Young Men
Sometimes I think that my best writing comes from exposing my fears and vulnerabilities and hoping that nobody notices it's about me.
VICTORIA LAURIE
Twitter post, October 13, 2014
Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
PHILIP ROTH
attributed, Literary Agents: How to Get & Work With the Right One For You
Here are the two states in which you may exist: person who writes, or person who does not. If you write: you are a writer. If you do not write: you are not. Aspiring is a meaningless null state that romanticizes Not Writing. It's as ludicrous as saying, "I aspire to pick up that piece of paper that fell on the floor." Either pick it up or don't. I don’t want to hear about how your diaper's full. Take it off or stop talking about it.
CHUCK WENDIG
The Kick-Ass Writer
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
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, Bad TV: The Very Best of the Very Worst
Writing is creative, which is right brain activity. Editing is rational, logical and process/rule driven, which is left-brain activity. It seems that, if you switch consistently between the two, the creative process becomes derailed by all the rules and forms. You scare it back into the shadows.
DAVID CHISLETT
"Editing Is Not Writing", Books LIVE, February 12, 2016
If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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
As we understand it, the surest way to make a living by the pen is to raise pigs.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, The Writer's Workout
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.
ANAÏS NIN
The Diary of Anaïs Nin
The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit -- for gallantry in defeat -- for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.
JOHN STEINBECK
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1962
Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.
JACK LONDON
"Getting Into Print", Editor magazine, 1903
If you want to write ... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Words from the Wise
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.
GRAHAM GREENE
New York Times, October 9, 1985
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook D", Aphorisms