WRITING QUOTES VI

quotations about writing

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.

MARTIN AMIS

Essays


When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don't choose what kind of story it is or what's going to happen. I just wait.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Paris Review, summer 2004


When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

KURT VONNEGUT

attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations

Tags: Kurt Vonnegut


All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A Moveable Feast

Tags: Ernest Hemingway


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


Cautious men have many adverbs, "usually," "nearly," "almost ": safe men begin, " it may be advanced " : you never know precisely what their premises are, nor what their conclusion is; they go tremulously like a timid rider; they turn hither and thither; they do not go straight across a subject, like a masterly mind.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: Walter Bagehot


You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. It's just so easy to give up!

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

Locus Magazine, June 2000


I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.

TANITH LEE

Realms of Fantasy, August 2009

Tags: Tanith Lee


A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere -- even in prison.

LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

The Atlantic, October 15, 1997

Tags: Louis Auchincloss


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


One of the things that writers very quickly learn to avoid is talking their work away. Talking about your work hardens it prematurely, and weakens the charge. You need to keep a fluid sense of the work in hand--it has to be able to change almost without your being aware that it's changing.

TOBIAS WOLFF

The Paris Review, fall 2004


Let us not, then, lament over the decay and oblivion into which ancient writers descend; they do but submit to the great law of nature, which declares that all sublunary shapes of matter shall be limited in their duration, but which decrees, also, that their elements and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity, and the species continue to flourish. Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them--and from whom they had stolen.

WASHINGTON IRVING

"The Art of Book-Making", The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon


I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

The Washington Post, November 13, 2009


Each book starts from ashes.

PHILIP ROTH

interview with Cynthia Haven, "The Book Haven"

Tags: Philip Roth


Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Nobel Prize speech, December 10, 1954

Tags: Ernest Hemingway


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


You grow a whole lot more as a writer by getting old stories out of the house and letting new ones come in and live with you until they grow up and are ready to go. Don't let the old ones stay there and grow fat and cranky and eat all the food out of the refrigerator. You have dozens of generations of stories inside you, but the only way to make room for the new ones is to write the old ones and mail them off.

ORSON SCOTT CARD

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tags: Orson Scott Card


So basically, it's totally selfish why I write. There are more harmful ways to spend your time, is how I justify it I guess. If my stories can make others laugh, or make others feel unexpected and complicated emotions, well then it's more than feeling good, then it's a bonus, then its rewarding, then you're building community.

TYLER BARTON

"Millennial Writers on Writing", Huffington Post, February 16, 2016


There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a sheet, as in riding across a country.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

Tags: Walter Bagehot


But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

Tags: Aristotle