WRITING QUOTES XX

quotations about writing

Well, I don't ever leave out details, in that I don't come up with information or description which I don't then use. I only ever come up with what seems to me absolutely essential to make the story work. I'm not usually an overwriter. As I revise, it's usually a matter of adding in as much vivid details as seem necessary to make the story come clear without slowing down the momentum of the story.

KELLY LINK

interview, Apex Magazine, July 2, 2013

Tags: Kelly Link


Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


Writer's block is only a failure of the ego.

NORMAN MAILER

attributed, A Writer's Time


Writers cannot let themselves be servants of the official mythology. They have to, whatever the cost, say what truth they have to say.

TOBIAS WOLFF

Continuum, summer 1998

Tags: Tobias Wolff


After a few days of writing I am as happy to see people as if I've been marooned on a desert island for a month.

ROSEMARY JENKINSON

"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017


All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

undated letter to his daughter "Scottie"

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald


As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says "you are nothing," I will be a writer.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Gonzo


Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

interview, SF Site, April 2001


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

Tags: Fran Lebowitz


I think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us, and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it? That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them and as they are.

MARKUS ZUSAK

"On Top of His Game: SLJ Interviews Margaret A. Edwards Award Winner Markus Zusak", School Library Journal, June 2, 2014

Tags: Markus Zusak


I write from a thorough conviction that it is the duty of me, and with the belief that, after every drawback and shortcoming, I do my best, all things considered--that is for me, and, so being, the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope, in nowise affect me.

ROBERT BROWNING

letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 11, 1845

Tags: Robert Browning


Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Paris Review, spring 1956

Tags: William Faulkner


Only the hunger for something beyond the personal will allow a writer to break free of one major obstacle to originality -- the fear of self-revelation.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

Tags: Jane Hirshfield


So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair


The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Tags: Luigi Pirandello


The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.

ANAÏS NIN

The Diary of Anaïs Nin


The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

CHARLES DE LINT

The Blue Girl

Tags: Charles de Lint


The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit -- for gallantry in defeat -- for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.

JOHN STEINBECK

Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1962


We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that's where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe.

TANITH LEE

"Love & Death & Publishers", Locus Magazine, April 1998

Tags: Tanith Lee


When I was teaching -- I taught for a while -- my students would write as if they were raised by wolves. Or raised on the streets. They were middle-class kids and they were ashamed of their background. They felt like unless they grew up in poverty, they had nothing to write about. Which was interesting because I had always thought that poor people were the ones who were ashamed. But it's not. It's middle-class people who are ashamed of their lives. And it doesn't really matter what your life was like, you can write about anything. It's just the writing of it that is the challenge. I felt sorry for these kids, that they thought that their whole past was absolutely worthless because it was less than remarkable.

DAVID SEDARIS

January Magazine, June 2000

Tags: David Sedaris