WRITING QUOTES III

quotations about writing

Writing quote

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

JOHN STEINBECK

The Paris Review, fall 1975

Tags: John Steinbeck


Sex has to be good for both partners. That is also the key to writing both fiction and nonfiction. It has to be a good experience for both partners, the writer and the reader, and it is a source of distress to me to observe how frequently writers ignore the pleasure of their partners.

SOL STEIN

Stein on Writing


It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

"Carlos Ruiz Zafon's love letter to literature", New Zealand Listener, March 14, 2013

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No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

My Day

Tags: Eleanor Roosevelt


Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.

HENRIK IBSEN

letter to Munich editor Georg Conrad


Whoop! 6K words, 21 pages, and 8 miles on the treadmill -- DONE! #ProductiveDay #LetThereBeIceCream

VICTORIA LAURIE

Twitter post, December 21, 2014

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A writer's greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is the best a writer can do.

ANDY ROONEY

"A Few Words from Andy Rooney: A Face of America Commentary"

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I can remember discussing the effect of the typewriter on our work with Tom Eliot because he was moving to the typewriter about the same time I was. And I remember our agreeing that it made for a slight change of style in the prose -- that you tended to use more periodic sentences, a little shorter, and a rather choppier style -- and that one must be careful about that. Because, you see, you couldn't look ahead quite far enough, for you were always thinking about putting your fingers on the bloody keys. But that was a passing phase only. We both soon discovered that we were just as free to let the style throw itself into the air as we had been writing manually.

CONRAD AIKEN

interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968


Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

"The Art of Metaphor"

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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

Tags: John Banville


To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.

V. S. NAIPAUL

New York Times, April 24, 1994


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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A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull
For writing treason and for writing dull.

JOHN DRYDEN

Absalom and Achitophel

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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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A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.

TOBIAS WOLFF

Old School


I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.

HAROLD PINTER

interview, December 1971

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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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If I've already figured out how the book ends, why bother to finish writing it? My writing isn't terribly efficient, because I often have to backtrack a bit when I change my mind, but I like the sense of discovery that comes from not knowing what happens next.

PATRICIA BRIGGS

interview, Bitten by Books, March 30, 2010

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All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A Moveable Feast

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I seldom have a firm plot or any idea at all about the ending. But there is a clear, almost mathematically conceptual idea that determines length--the length or brevity of a literary work being comparable to the size of the frame needed by a picture.

HEINRICH BÖLL

The Paris Review, spring 1983