WRITING QUOTES XV

quotations about writing

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

Tags: Marcel Proust


If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.

STAN LEE

interview, March 13, 2006

Tags: Stan Lee


Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche


Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!

HILAIRE BELLOC

The Path to Rome

Tags: Hilaire Belloc


Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking

JANE HIRSHFIELD

"Sweater"

Tags: Jane Hirshfield


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


I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings. The partly draped statue has a charm which the nude lacks. Who would have those marble folds slip from the raised knee of the Venus of Melos?

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH

Ponkapog Papers

Tags: Thomas Bailey Aldrich


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


The first forms of writing emerged not for art, literature, or love, not for spiritual or liturgical purposes, but for business--all literature could be said to originate from sales receipts (sorry).

DANIEL J. LEVITIN

The Organized Mind

Tags: Daniel J. Levitin


I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

TANITH LEE

The Book of the Damned

Tags: Tanith Lee


I try to get a feeling of what's going on in the story before I put it down on paper, but actually most of this breaking-in period is one long, fantastic daydream, in which I think about anything but the work at hand. I can't turn out slews of stuff each day. I wish I could. I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each paragraph--each sentence, even--as I go along.

WILLIAM STYRON

The Paris Review, spring 1954


Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down. The one hope for a writer is that although his enemies are often unseen they are seldom unheard. He must listen for the death-watch, listen for the faint toc-toc, the critic's truth sharpened by envy, the embarrassed praise of a sincere friend, the silence of gifted contemporaries, the implications of the don in the manger, the visitor in the small hours. He must dismiss the builders and contractors, elude the fans with an assumed name and dark glasses, force his way off the moving staircase, subject every thing he writes to a supreme critical court. Would it amuse Horace or Milton or Swift or Leopardi? Could it be read to Flaubert? Would it be chosen by the Infallible Worm, by the discriminating palates of the dead?

CYRIL CONNOLLY

Enemies of Promise


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

Tags: Graham Greene


For a moment, I debated whether I should tell someone about the words I'd started writing down, but I couldn't. In a way, I felt ashamed, even though my writing was the one thing that whispered okayness in my ear. I didn't speak it, to anyone.

MARKUS ZUSAK

Getting the Girl

Tags: Markus Zusak


I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

SAM SHEPARD

The Observer, March 20, 2010

Tags: Sam Shepard


I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

interview with Oprah Winfrey, June 1, 2008


To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement -- it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writers build their own realities, move into them, and occasionally send letters home.

DAVID GERROLD

The Martian Child

Tags: David Gerrold


The factors controlling a writer's popularity are as mysterious and ultimately as unknowable as the number of stars in the sky.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

interview, SF Site, April 2001

Tags: Samuel R. Delany


One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.

EMILE ZOLA

Le Figaro


The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

JOHN STEINBECK

New York Times, June 2, 1969

Tags: John Steinbeck