WRITING QUOTES XXI

quotations about writing


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/w/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 27

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.

J. D. SALINGER
Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/w/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 37

"Seymour: An Introduction"


Notice: Undefined variable: id in /hermes/walnacweb03/walnacweb03ak/b2149/pow.notablequote/htdocs/w/includes/quoter_subj.php on line 63

Tags: J. D. Salinger


Getting even is one great reason for writing.... But getting even isn't necessarily vicious. There are two ways of getting even: one is destructive and the other is restorative. It depends on how the scales are weighted.

WILLIAM H. GASS

The Paris Review, summer 1977


As the deadline looms, my quality of writing is in danger of declining all because I just had to check my email.

GERI SPIELER

"The Dangers of Distracted Writing", Huffington Post, February 28, 2016


As far back as I can remember, I've been writing. I've always had this wild imagination, and I love to embellish stories to make them more interesting. When I was a kid I had all these intricate histories for all my stuffed animals and dollhouse families, which I would type out on this old manual typewriter my parents set up for me in the corner of our TV room. I kept writing all through middle school, and in high school I got diverted a bit, but I picked it up again in college. I really didn't think I'd actually be a writer until I graduated and found that I just couldn't stop and go get a real job. Every time I finished something, another idea would follow right behind. So I went into waitressing and just wrote like crazy. At times it seemed really stupid, since I was totally broke and there was no kind of guarantee that I'd ever see anything come of it. Luckily, it did. But even if I hadn't sold a book by now I'd still be writing. It becomes a part of you, just something you do.

SARAH DESSEN

interview, Puffin Books

Tags: Sarah Dessen


All good writing leaves something unexpressed.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


You will always have days when you feel like an amateur. When it feels like everybody else is better than you. You will have this nagging suspicion that someone will eventually find you out, call you on your bullshit, realize you're the literary equivalent of a vagrant painting on the side of a wall with a piece of calcified poop. You will have days when the blank page is like being lost in a blizzard. You will sometimes hate what you wrote today, yesterday, or ten years ago. Bad days are part of the package. You just have to shut them out, swaddle your head in tinfoil, and keep writing anyway.

CHUCK WENDIG

The Kick-Ass Writer

Tags: Chuck Wendig


You do have a leash, finally, as a writer. You're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays--to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.

HAROLD PINTER

The Progressive, March 2001

Tags: Harold Pinter


When I first started I was obsessed--putting in 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and loving it. My in-laws told my husband that perhaps he should get some help for me. Once the book was published it was OK because writers can be a little crazy.

JEAN M. AUEL

interview, goodreads, April 2011

Tags: Jean M. Auel


When I am asked how or why I wrote this or that, I always find myself quite embarassed. I would gladly furnish not merely the questioner, but myself as well, with an exhaustive answer, but can never do so. I cannot recreate the context in its entirety, yet I wish that I could, so that at least the literature I myself make might be made slightly less of a mysterious process than bridge-building and bread-baking.

HEINRICH BÖLL

Nobel Lecture, May 2, 1973

Tags: Heinrich Böll


Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


To write is to act.

HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE

Letters to Young Men

Tags: Henri-Dominique Lacordaire


To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Guardian, December 17, 2005

Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. It cheapens and degrades the human experience, when it should inspire and elevate.

TOM WAITS

"Strange Innocence", Vanity Fair, July 2001

Tags: Tom Waits


The reason I write so slowly is because I try never to leave a sentence until it's as perfect as I can make it. So there isn't a word in any of my books that hasn't been gone over 40 times.

TOM ROBBINS

"In the Creative Process with Tom Robbins; Perfect Sentences, Imperfect Universe", New York Times, December 30, 1993

Tags: Tom Robbins


Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook D", Aphorisms

Tags: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Nobel Prize speech, December 10, 1954


I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry. I have a dog now, and I have to remember to walk him. When I write, that takes over and I can't do anything else. There's something exciting about that free fall, but then my life gets really screwed up. I've lost lots of relationships because of my having to ignore everything.

ADAM RAPP

interview, Theatre Communications Group

Tags: Adam Rapp


I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

MARTIN AMIS

The Paris Review, spring 1998


I think it is essential to promote your work, since there are over 100,000 books published each year, and readers can fall in love with books they've never heard about.

DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS

interview, The Writer's Life

Tags: Douglas Carlton Abrams


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