WRITING QUOTES IX

quotations about writing


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When you finish one book, you don't want to just write the same book again.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES
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Slate, October 10, 2011


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It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

Tags: Julian Barnes


So it is with all great writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of -- as opposed to thinking about themselves -- and to which they have not yet given expression.

MARCEL PROUST

Within a Budding Grove

Tags: Marcel Proust


I wish my prose to be transparent--I don't want the reader to stumble over me; I want him to look through what I'm saying to what I'm describing. I don't want him ever to say, Oh, goodness, how nicely written this is. That would be a failure.

V. S. NAIPAUL

The Paris Review, fall 1998

Tags: V. S. Naipaul


With pen and with pencil we're learning to say
Nothing, more cleverly every day.

WILLIAM ALLINGHAM

"Blackberries"

Tags: William Allingham


Transitions are usually not that interesting. I use space breaks instead, and a lot of them. A space break makes a clean segue whereas some segues you try to write sound convenient, contrived. The white space sets off, underscores, the writing presented, and you have to be sure it deserves to be highlighted this way. If used honestly and not as a gimmick, these spaces can signify the way the mind really works, noting moments and assembling them in such a way that a kind of logic or pattern comes forward, until the accretion of moments forms a whole experience, observation, state of being. The connective tissue of a story is often the white space, which is not empty.

AMY HEMPEL

The Paris Review, summer 2003

Tags: Amy Hempel


Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.

CONRAD AIKEN

interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968

Tags: Conrad Aiken


There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

EMILE ZOLA

letter to Cezanne

Tags: Emile Zola


The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Mystery and Manners


I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.

HANNAH ARENDT

interview, ZDF TV, Zur Person, October 28, 1964

Tags: Hannah Arendt


Irish English is a very different beast from English English or American English. Very different. The way in which Irish writers are only too happy to infuse their language with ambiguity is very different. An English writer will try to be clear. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass. The Irish writer would say: 'No no, it's a lens, it distorts everything.'

JOHN BANVILLE

"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000

Tags: John Banville


The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

Tags: Julian Barnes


The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

THOMAS MANN

Death in Venice

Tags: Thomas Mann


Writing is about growth, challenge and change. Without those things, there's no joy in it.

VERONICA ROTH

"Best-Selling Author Veronica Roth Tells What Writing Books Is Really Like", Entrepreneur, March 30, 2017


WHEN YOU LEAVE YOUR TYPEWRITER YOU LEAVE YOUR MACHINE GUN AND THE RATS COME POURING THROUGH.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Tags: Charles Bukowski


To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement -- it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writers build their own realities, move into them, and occasionally send letters home.

DAVID GERROLD

The Martian Child

Tags: David Gerrold


Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

DON DELILLO

Conversations with Don DeLillo


He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères

Tags: Jean de La Bruyère


Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

KURT VONNEGUT

attributed, Quit Your Day Job!

Tags: Kurt Vonnegut


When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.

MAYA ANGELOU

The Paris Review, fall 1990

Tags: Maya Angelou