WRITING QUOTES XXX

quotations about writing

I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

NORMAN MAILER

attributed, The Writer's Quotation Book


Most writers -- poets in especial -- prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy -- an ecstatic intuition -- and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought -- at the true purposes seized only at the last moment -- at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view -- at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable -- at the cautious selections and rejections -- at the painful erasures and interpolations -- in a word, at the wheels and pinions -- the tackle for scene-shifting -- the step-ladders and demon-traps -- the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.

EDGAR ALLAN POE

"The Philosophy of Composition"


You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

DON DELILLO

Conversations with Don DeLillo

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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

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I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.

KELLY LINK

interview, Electric Lit, February 6, 2015

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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 Books are out of date!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


Even though language has its richness the relationship between language and the writer is always like a stone and you have to make the stone human.

CARMEN BOULLOSA

Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1995

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I don't think I'm cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.

KELLY LINK

"Words by Flashlight", Sybil's Garage, June 7, 2006

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Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Paris Review, spring 1958

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In order to write the novel I'm committed to, I have to pretend that it's not only separate from everything I've written before, but also separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has written. This is a grotesque delusion and a crass vanity, but also a creative necessity.

JULIAN BARNES

The Paris Review, winter 2000


In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

CESARE PAVESE

This Business of Living, May 4, 1942

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The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.

WILLIAM H. GASS

A Temple of Texts

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In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

JOHN STEINBECK

New York Times, June 2, 1969


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

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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


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

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The right story needs the right telling.

JOHN GREEN

interview, Chicago Public Library


Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naïve and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality ... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.

DAN SIMMONS

Hyperion


Writing is a tough thing and you only get better with practice. Just like free throws.

NICK WESTFALL

"Man writes directorial debut movie 'Finding Home'", myfox8, March 30, 2017


Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

PHILIP ROTH

"My Life as a Writer", New York Times, March 2, 2014