quotations about writing
Writing is creative, which is right brain activity. Editing is rational, logical and process/rule driven, which is left-brain activity. It seems that, if you switch consistently between the two, the creative process becomes derailed by all the rules and forms. You scare it back into the shadows.
DAVID CHISLETT
"Editing Is Not Writing", Books LIVE, February 12, 2016
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
DAVID GERROLD
A Matter For Men
Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light -- and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau -- into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.
NADINE GORDIMER
Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1991
Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
SAUL BELLOW
Nobel lecture, December 12, 1976
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"
Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted.
GERALD ASHER
speech at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, February 2011
Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Sweater"
It is usual that the moment you write for publication--I mean one of course--one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Paris Review, fall 1975
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
With films, I just scribble a couple of notes for a scene. You don't have to do any writing at all, you just have your notes for the scene, which are written with the actors and the camera in mind. The actual script is a necessity for casting and budgeting, but the end product often doesn't bear much resemblance to the script--at least in my case.
WOODY ALLEN
The Paris Review, fall 1995
Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying--only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
The Last Tycoon
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
THOMAS WOLFE
The Autobiography of an American Novelist
If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
New York Times, April 19, 1992
What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.
TOM ROBBINS
"In the Creative Process with Tom Robbins; Perfect Sentences, Imperfect Universe", New York Times, December 30, 1993
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
Most writer zombies don't realize they are the undead, because they do just enough to convince themselves (and others) that they are actual writers. They talk a lot about writing -- boy, are writer zombies great talkers -- going on for hours about the screenplay or pilot they're supposedly writing or will write once they have the time. They also read writing books and blogs and take seminars because that makes them feel like they are in the game. And they take classes, especially those that impose short-term deadlines, because that gets them writing, which makes them feel alive. But once the class is over, they almost always go back to their zombie ways.
COREY MANDELL
"Beware the Writing Zombies", Huffington Post, February 25, 2016
What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Fiction Writers Review, April 5, 2009
Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.
JACK LONDON
"Getting Into Print", Editor magazine, 1903
Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"A Message About Messages", CBC Magazine
Remember that in today's market, distribution and promotion are as important as craft. But don't forget what made you want to write fiction. If it was for the money, you're in the wrong business!
ELIZABETH ZELVIN
interview, Book Browsing, July 26, 2012