quotations about writing
In my view, if you write every day you're a certified graphomaniac, you're OCD, you're addicted to the physical act and not the real, spiritual one.
ROSEMARY JENKINSON
"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017
Whether 10 or 1,000 people are listening is irrelevant. Writing is an investment in your future and your potential.
BIANCA BASS
"Why You Should Write (Even If It Feels Like Nobody Is Listening)", Huffington Post, February 29, 2016
So basically, it's totally selfish why I write. There are more harmful ways to spend your time, is how I justify it I guess. If my stories can make others laugh, or make others feel unexpected and complicated emotions, well then it's more than feeling good, then it's a bonus, then its rewarding, then you're building community.
TYLER BARTON
"Millennial Writers on Writing", Huffington Post, February 16, 2016
Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big.... This is a trophy brought back from the further realm, the kingdom of perpetual glistening night where we know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall.
KATE BRAVERMAN
attributed, From Book to Bestseller
With pen and with pencil we're learning to say
Nothing, more cleverly every day.
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
"Blackberries"
In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Writers are made--forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities.
CHUCK WENDIG
250 Things You Should Know About Writing
Well, I don't ever leave out details, in that I don't come up with information or description which I don't then use. I only ever come up with what seems to me absolutely essential to make the story work. I'm not usually an overwriter. As I revise, it's usually a matter of adding in as much vivid details as seem necessary to make the story come clear without slowing down the momentum of the story.
KELLY LINK
interview, Apex Magazine, July 2, 2013
I tend to be very much a planner. I mean obviously details veer in the telling all the time, that's clearly the case, but in terms of the broad architecture of a book I plot carefully and if things start to veer halfway through, I tend to stop and either pull them back on course, or if I realize they are going in a better direction, I extrapolate and work out what effect this is going to have further down. I am not one of these writers who is able to enjoy flying by the sit of my pants. And there's no value judgment there, incidentally. I am very well aware that some absolutely fantastic, wonderful writers do that. For me, no, I cannot do it. I have to plan quite meticulously.
CHINA MIÉVILLE
"In a Carapace of Light: A Conversation with China Miéville", Clarkesworld
I like that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It's probably what I love most about writing--that words can be used in a way that's like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around. They're the best moments in a day of writing -- when an image appears that you didn't know would be there when you started work in the morning.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief
Fine writing is generally the effect of spontaneous thoughts and a labored style.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
I can't leave a chapter alone until I think it's as good as I can make it at that time. Often I will reach a stage, say, a third of the way into the book, where I realize there's something very wrong. Everything starts to feel shallow and false and unsatisfactory. At that stage I'll go back to the beginning. I might have written only fifty pages, but it's like a cantilever and the whole thing is getting very shaky because I haven't thought things through properly. So I'll start again and I'll write all the way through and then just keep going until it starts to get shaky again, and then I'll go back because I'll know that there's something really considerable, something deeply necessary waiting to be discovered or made. Often these are unbelievably big things. Sometimes they are things that readers will ultimately think the book is about.
PETER CAREY
The Paris Review, summer 2006
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, 2012: Waking of the Prophets
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
CHARLES SIMIC
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller
All Writing Is Garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. The whole literary scene is a pigpen, especially today.
ANTONIN ARTAUD
Selected Writings
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
DORIS LESSING
The Paris Review, spring 1988