quotations about writing
Some people talk to themselves, and some people write, and somehow society has decided that one gets committed and one gets a paycheck.
BOB LONSBERRY
official website
How hard is the destiny of a maker of books! He has to cut and sew up in order to make ideas follow logically. But when one writes a book on reverie, has the time not come to let the pen run, to let reverie speak, and better yet to dream the reverie at the same time one believes he is transcribing it?
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
Writing is a kind of centering, a kind of meditation. I find it to be profoundly rewarding. Actually, I'm an addict. If I go too long, and so far that hasn't been longer than a week, I start to feel unsettled, nervous. I begin to feel that I'm not engaged, a disconnection is threatening my world, that I'm being passed by and I'm both failing myself and the world by not writing about it.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"
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
I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage--that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
The Art of Being Ruled
If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
New York Times, April 19, 1992
When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.
MARTIN AMIS
"The Past Gets Bigger and the Future Shrinks", Los Angeles Review of Books, July 21, 2013
I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry. I have a dog now, and I have to remember to walk him. When I write, that takes over and I can't do anything else. There's something exciting about that free fall, but then my life gets really screwed up. I've lost lots of relationships because of my having to ignore everything.
ADAM RAPP
interview, Theatre Communications Group
There is a realm of possible knowledge which can be reached by artists, which is not susceptible of mathematical verification but which is true. This is sometimes spoken as the ineffable. If there is any word I detest in the language, this would be it, but the fact that it exists, the word ineffable, is suspicious in that it suggests that there might be something that is ineffable. And I believe that that's the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful, they reach it.
DONALD BARTHELME
"A Symposium of Fiction"
I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
LOUIS ARAGON
Treatise on Style
I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, "Is he sick?" "No," my wife says, "he's writing something." I have to do it that way on account of my eyes. I still write occasionally--in the proper sense of the word--using black crayon on yellow paper and getting perhaps twenty words to the page. My usual method, though, is to spend the mornings turning over the text in my mind. Then in the afternoon, between two and five, I call in a secretary and dictate to her. I can do about two thousand words. It took me about ten years to learn.
JAMES THURBER
The Paris Review, fall 1955
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
I can't leave a chapter alone until I think it's as good as I can make it at that time. Often I will reach a stage, say, a third of the way into the book, where I realize there's something very wrong. Everything starts to feel shallow and false and unsatisfactory. At that stage I'll go back to the beginning. I might have written only fifty pages, but it's like a cantilever and the whole thing is getting very shaky because I haven't thought things through properly. So I'll start again and I'll write all the way through and then just keep going until it starts to get shaky again, and then I'll go back because I'll know that there's something really considerable, something deeply necessary waiting to be discovered or made. Often these are unbelievably big things. Sometimes they are things that readers will ultimately think the book is about.
PETER CAREY
The Paris Review, summer 2006
That's also part of having great editors -- they can sort of be honest with you and say, "I see where you're headed with this, but I don't think it's there yet. Dig deeper, babe, and come back with something more." And that's what you do, you dig waaaaaaaay down and you walk around the block eight million times and then you have it -- shazam! And it all comes together in something soooo much better than you thought you were capable of.
VICTORIA LAURIE
interview, Author's Den
I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, A. V. Club, June 17, 2011
To write is to act.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
Letters to Young Men
I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have.
JOHN GREEN
"Nov. 26th: Writing Advice (And Notes on Surnameless Tiffany)", YouTube
Sometimes I think that my best writing comes from exposing my fears and vulnerabilities and hoping that nobody notices it's about me.
VICTORIA LAURIE
Twitter post, October 13, 2014
Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.
PHILIP ROTH
attributed, Literary Agents: How to Get & Work With the Right One For You