quotations about writing
Here are the two states in which you may exist: person who writes, or person who does not. If you write: you are a writer. If you do not write: you are not. Aspiring is a meaningless null state that romanticizes Not Writing. It's as ludicrous as saying, "I aspire to pick up that piece of paper that fell on the floor." Either pick it up or don't. I don’t want to hear about how your diaper's full. Take it off or stop talking about it.
CHUCK WENDIG
The Kick-Ass Writer
The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)
MARTIN AMIS
The Information
If it is a distinction to have written a good book, it is also a disgrace to have written a bad one.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
There is probably no hell for authors in the next world--they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
"The Business of a Novelist"
The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
CHARLES SIMIC
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller
Good fiction creates its own reality.
NORA ROBERTS
The Stanislaski Brothers
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
A lot of novelists start late--Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978
Hate the autocracy of the kept gates all you like, but the forge of rejection purifies us (provided it doesn't burn us down to a fluffy pile of cinder). The writer learns so much from rejection about himself, his work, the market, the business. Even authors who choose to self-publish should, from time to time, submit themselves to the scraping talons and biting beaks of the raptors of rejection. Writers who have never experienced rejection are no different than children who get awards for everything they do: they have already found themselves tap-dancing at the top of the "I'm-So-Special" mountain, never having to climb through snow and karate chop leopards to get there.
CHUCK WENDIG
"25 Things Writers Should Know About Rejection", Terrible Minds
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
Many writers are there that paint a stolen jade and sell it for a colt at the nearest fair.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.
JAMES JOYCE
interview with Max Eastman, Harper's Magazine, 1929?
Read heavily in the area where you want to write. Be aware of what's selling and what's doing well but don't try to write to market trends; they are fleeting.
JEFF ABBOTT
interview, Book Browse
Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you'd pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still -- do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-lectured, un-criticized, untaught?
VIRGINIA WOOLF
"Words Fail Me", BBC radio, April 29, 1937
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
DAVID GERROLD
A Matter For Men
Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook J", The Waste Books
You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"The Shadow Maker", The Telegraph, November 27, 2005