quotations about writing
When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.
MAYA ANGELOU
The Paris Review, fall 1990
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
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
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
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
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
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
Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On Paraguay"
The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing it well or you're doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That is actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.
JOHN GREEN
"July 19: A Day in the Life of a Writer (Who Has No Friends)", YouTube
Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Stone Gods
The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.
CHRIS ABANI
attributed, Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction
When you finish one book, you don't want to just write the same book again.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Slate, October 10, 2011
When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Notebooks
I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
National Observer, March 12, 1977
He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.
KATY LEDERER
interview, Identity Theory, February 12, 2005
I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
The Paris Review, spring 1969