quotations about writing
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The New Statesman, February 25, 1933
Writing the first chapter can feel like you're trying to artificially inseminate a stampeding mastodon with one hand duct taped to your leg. That's okay. That's normal. Do it and get through it.
CHUCK WENDIG
"25 Things to Know about Writing the First Chapter of Your Novel", Terrible Minds
To the question of writing at all we have sometimes been counselled to forget it, or rather the writing of books. What is required, we are told, is plays and films. Books are out of date! The book is dead, long live television! One question which is not even raised let alone considered is: Who will write the drama and film scripts when the generation that can read and write has been used up?
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Criticism
From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book's no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I've wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it's finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that's nearly broken his back ... Then it starts all over again, and it'll go on starting all over again till it grinds the life out of me, and I shall end my days furious with myself for lacking talent, for not leaving behind a more finished work, a bigger pile of books, and lie on my death-bed filled with awful doubts about the task I've done, wondering whether it was as it ought to have been, whether I ought not to have done this or that, expressing my last dying breath the wish that I might do it all over again!
ÉMILE ZOLA
The Masterpiece
The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity -- but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
A Soviet Heretic
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
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
STEPHEN KING
On Writing
If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Teacher", Winesburg, Ohio
I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
SHANNON HALE
attributed, The Novel-Writing Plan
I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, February 1986
Theatre and publishing worship either precocious young writers or mute dead ones.
ROSEMARY JENKINSON
"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017
Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings and they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it--that's what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. Okay, I say to myself, that's your beginning, start there; that's the first paragraph of the book.
PHILIP ROTH
Paris Review, fall 1984
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
I want to be the apostle of self destruction. I want my book to affect man's reason, his emotions, his nerves, his whole animal nature. I should like my book to make people turn pale with horror as they read it, to affect them like a drug, like a terrifying dream, to drive them mad, to make them curse and hate me but still to read me.
LEONID ANDREYEV
diary, August 1, 1891
The right story needs the right telling.
JOHN GREEN
interview, Chicago Public Library
[Writing is] hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
JOAN DIDION
The Paris Review, fall-winter 1978
I'm such a slow writer I have no need for anything as fast as a word processor. I don't need anything so snappy. I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.
EUDORA WELTY
On Writing
It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.
ELIZABETH STROUT
Newsweek, July 13, 2009