quotations about writing
Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse
I hate writing, I love having written.
DOROTHY PARKER
attributed, Rhymes with Vain
I think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us, and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it? That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them and as they are.
MARKUS ZUSAK
"On Top of His Game: SLJ Interviews Margaret A. Edwards Award Winner Markus Zusak", School Library Journal, June 2, 2014
I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
JOHN DRYDEN
Essay on Satire
So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, The Creative Compass: Writing Your Way from Inspiration to Publication
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
attributed, Literary Agents: How to Get & Work with the Right One for You
To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.
KINGSLEY AMIS
The Amis Collection: Selected Non-fiction
When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?
DAVID SEDARIS
Oasis Magazine, June 2008
While I am writing, the sea's roar is coming up to me, and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once.
THOMAS MANN
Tonio Kröger
With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
JAMES THURBER
New York Post, June 30, 1955
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
Writing is a kind of centering, a kind of meditation. I find it to be profoundly rewarding. Actually, I'm an addict. If I go too long, and so far that hasn't been longer than a week, I start to feel unsettled, nervous. I begin to feel that I'm not engaged, a disconnection is threatening my world, that I'm being passed by and I'm both failing myself and the world by not writing about it.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"
After a few days of writing I am as happy to see people as if I've been marooned on a desert island for a month.
ROSEMARY JENKINSON
"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017
After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.
GEORGE ADE
"The Fable of the Bohemian Who Had Hard Luck", Fables in Slang
After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.
JEAN COCTEAU
The Paris Review, summer-fall, 1964
Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naïve and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality ... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion