quotations about writing
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
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
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
In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
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
Writing sets off a spark in my heart, and I'm going to start a fire.
TIFFANY FERENTINI
"Millennial Writers on Writing", Huffington Post, February 16, 2016
Everything you look at can be turned into a story ... you can make a tale of everything you touch.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
"The Elder Tree Mother"
Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past--it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases.
JOHN ASHBERY
interview, The Paris Review, winter 1983
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
I didn't do anything as active as deciding that I wanted to be a writer. For one thing, I didn't feel like I was the final authority on whether or not I was anything like a writer. (I'm a timid soul.) I just kept writing stories, because becoming a veterinarian seemed as if it involved too much dissection.
KELLY LINK
"Words by Flashlight", Sybil's Garage, June 7, 2006
The same common-sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.
TOBIAS WOLFF
In Pharaoh's Army
Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook D", Aphorisms
The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Twitter post, May 31, 2009
The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
RAY BRADBURY
Fahrenheit 451
Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
MARTIN AMIS
London Fields
Gotta have a head like a wrecking ball, a spirit like one of them punching clown dummies that always weeble-wobbles back up to standing. This takes time. Stories need to find the right home, the right audience. Stick with it. Quitting is for sad pandas.
CHUCK WENDIG
250 Things You Should Know About Writing
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Letters
Brevity is the sister of talent.
ANTON CHEKHOV
letter to A. P. Chekhov, April 11, 1889
Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process -- it is, after all, black magic, and may lose its power if we look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.
EDWARD ALBEE
introduction, Three Tall Women