quotations about writing
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
It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.
WILLIAM H. GASS
On Being Blue
I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing -- I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project -- it's an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Conversations with Zizek
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
To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.
KINGSLEY AMIS
The Amis Collection: Selected Non-fiction
While I am writing, the sea's roar is coming up to me, and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once.
THOMAS MANN
Tonio Kröger
It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Nobel Prize speech, December 10, 1954
In creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.
ORSON SCOTT CARD
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
New York Times, April 19, 1992
That writer who aspires to immortality, should imitate the sculptor, if he would make the labours of the pen as durable as those of the chisel. Like the sculptor, he should arrive at ultimate perfection, not by what he adds, but by what he takes away.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
undated letter to his daughter "Scottie"
When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?
DAVID SEDARIS
Oasis Magazine, June 2008
You do have a leash, finally, as a writer. You're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays--to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.
HAROLD PINTER
The Progressive, March 2001
As we understand it, the surest way to make a living by the pen is to raise pigs.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
JOHN DRYDEN
Essay on Satire
As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
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
I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
Everything you look at can be turned into a story ... you can make a tale of everything you touch.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
"The Elder Tree Mother"