quotations about 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
Keep your head down, avoid all the distractions of being a writer today--all the shifts in the business, all the drama, all the debating about where publishing is going--and write the best story that you can. It sounds a bit glib, but I think this is advice a lot of people are having trouble following right now. It is so hard to focus. But that is the single key to success.
JEFF ABBOTT
The Big Thrill, June 30, 2013
When I started out I just wanted to write books. I still do. It's the best job in the world for so many reasons. I wanted the thrill of seeing my books on the shelves in bookstores. I still do. The idea of someone reading my work, enjoying it was just amazing--and it still is. The bar rises, and that's a good thing. It pushes us to write smarter, write better, to dig deeper creatively. The bestseller lists, the awards, the sales or movies, they're all really delicious icing. But the work--the stories, the books--that's the cake. Too much icing without a really good, solid cake? It's going to make you fat, lazy and maybe a little bit sick. It's always about the cake first.
NORA ROBERTS
interview, inReads, October 5, 2011
When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997
Writing can't be a way of life -- the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
DORIS LESSING
Doris Lessing: Conversations
You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
attributed, Writers on Writing
I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them anymore. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do.
CHARLES DE LINT
"Music and Myth: A Conversation with Charles de Lint", The Internet Review of Science Fiction
I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
"In Conversation: Fran Lebowitz with Phong Bui", The Brooklyn Rail, March 4, 2014
I write because I've always written, can't stop. I am a writing animal. The way a silk worm is a silk-producing animal.
DORIS LESSING
attributed, Shoptalk: Learning to Write with Writers
I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.
SAM SHEPARD
The Paris Review
In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity ... But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous ... In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Women and Fiction", Granite and Rainbow
Rejection has value. It teaches us when our work or our skillset is not good enough and must be made better. This is a powerful revelation, like the burning UFO wheel seen by the prophet Ezekiel, or like the McRib sandwich shaped like the Virgin Mary seen by the prophet Steve Jenkins. Rejection refines us. Those who fall prey to its enervating soul-sucking tentacles are doomed. Those who persist past it are survivors. Best ask yourself the question: what kind of writer are you? The kind who survives? Or the kind who gets asphyxiated by the tentacles of woe?
CHUCK WENDIG
"25 Things Writers Should Know About Rejection", Terrible Minds
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.
MARK TWAIN
"How to Tell a Story"
Why write it? I thought it would earn me money.
ROBERT REED
interview, Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 18, 2012
Writing is always a rough translation from wordlessness into words.
CHARLES SIMIC
attributed, Stealing Glimpses: Of Poetry, Poets, and Things in Between
Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
I decided very early that I wanted to write. But I didn't think of it as a career. I didn't even think of it as a profession.... It was the most exciting thing, the most powerful thing, the most wonderful thing to do with my life. And I didn't question if I should -- I just kept sharpening the pencils!
MARY OLIVER
The Christian Science Monitor, December 9, 1992
I truly believe that writing is a continuum--so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better.
CHRIS ABANI
interview, UTNE Reader, June 2010
I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool--and I'm not any of those--to say that I don't write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.
MAYA ANGELOU
The Paris Review, fall 1990