quotations about writing
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.
GRAHAM GREENE
New York Times, October 9, 1985
As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says "you are nothing," I will be a writer.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Gonzo
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.
PHILIP ROTH
Ghost Writer
You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
JOHN DRYDEN
Essay on Satire
I can't understand why a person will take a year or two to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.
FRED ALLEN
attributed, Books: Their History, Art, Power, Glory, Infamy and Suffering According to Their Creators, Friends and Enemies
What I like to do is write the story, see where it takes me -- and then check out the details I don't know. When I first started writing, there were a lot of things about the world that I understood but didn't have the vocabulary for -- and even more things that I just had no idea about. For instance, do you know all the parts of a door frame? Or what flowers bloom in the spring in alpine climates? There's a surprising amount of homework involved in writing a book.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
interview, Bitten by Books, March 30, 2010
I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, A. V. Club, June 17, 2011
Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
The Paris Review, spring 1956
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
letter to Madame Louise Colet, December 9, 1852
Some people talk to themselves, and some people write, and somehow society has decided that one gets committed and one gets a paycheck.
BOB LONSBERRY
official website
Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
ANN PATCHETT
Truth and Beauty
Fiction writers, at least in their braver moments, do desire the truth: to know it, speak it, serve it. But they go about it in a peculiar and devious way, which consists in inventing persons, places, and events which never did and never will exist or occur, and telling about these fictions in detail and at length and with a great deal of emotion, and then when they are done writing down this pack of lies, they say, There! That's the truth!
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness
Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.
MARKUS ZUSAK
"Why I Write", The Guardian, March 28, 2008
What I cannot thus eliminate, what I must, head down, eyes shut, with the courage of a battalion and the blindness of a bull, charge and disperse are, indubitably, the figures behind the ferns, commercial travellers. There I've hidden them all this time in the hope that somehow they'd disappear, or better still emerge, as indeed they must, if the story's to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with it two, if not three, commercial travellers and a whole grove of aspidistra.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"An Unfinished Novel", The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
J. D. SALINGER
attributed, Salinger: A Biography
There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.
EUDORA WELTY
On Writing
Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
MARTIN AMIS
London Fields