WRITING QUOTES IX

quotations about writing

Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah

Tags: Chinua Achebe


Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.

DONALD BARTHELME

"On Paraguay"

Tags: Donald Barthelme


Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.

CHINUA ACHEBE

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra


The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.

ROLAND BARTHES

The Pleasures of the Text


Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

interview, Ruminator Magazine, August/September 2005

Tags: Fran Lebowitz


He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères

Tags: Jean de La Bruyère


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


Read heavily in the area where you want to write. Be aware of what's selling and what's doing well but don't try to write to market trends; they are fleeting.

JEFF ABBOTT

interview, Book Browse


We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

Tags: Anne Lamott


There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

EMILE ZOLA

letter to Cezanne

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I have not felt in a humor to entertain you if I had taken up my pen. Perhaps some unbecoming invective might have fallen from it.

ABIGAIL ADAMS

letter to John Adams, May 7, 1776

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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

Tags: Amy Hempel


I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

SAM SHEPARD

The Observer, March 20, 2010

Tags: Sam Shepard


It is hard to make a good documentary about writing. Writing is internal, it slowly takes shape in a mind, sometimes after the not very cinematic process of staring at a wall until the words come.

JULIA COOPER

"Obit doc examines the art of the obituary at The New York Times", The Globe and Mail, March 30, 2017


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

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After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from books, since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at things for himself.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

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Every writer is an iron-monger that melts down old junk into new steel.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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In secluding himself too much from society, an author is in danger of losing that intimate acquaintance with life which is the only sure foundation of power in a writer.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.

JAMES JOYCE

interview with Max Eastman, Harper's Magazine, 1929?

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I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.

ELIZABETH BISHOP

Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop

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