quotations about writing
I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.
TANITH LEE
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The Book of the Damned
Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus
So it is with all great writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of -- as opposed to thinking about themselves -- and to which they have not yet given expression.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
I tend to write things seven times before I show them to my editor. I write them seven times, then I take them on tour, read them like a dozen times on tour, then go back to the room and rewrite, read and rewrite, and I try to learn as much as I can on my own before I show it to my editor at The New Yorker. I would never show him a first draft, because then he's really going to be sick of it by the twelfth draft.
DAVID SEDARIS
Oasis Magazine, June 2008
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
After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from books, since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at things for himself.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
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
No music. No rituals. At home I write in my office or on the laptop in the kitchen where our puppy likes to sleep, and I love his company. But I've trained myself to be able to work anywhere, and I write on trains, planes, in automobiles (if I'm not the driver), airports, hotel rooms. I travel often. If I couldn't write wherever I was I would get little done. I also can write in short bursts. Fifteen minutes are enough to move a story forward.
GAIL CARSON LEVINE
interview, Bookshop Talk, September 22, 2011
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
JAMES JOYCE
letter to Fanny Guillermet, September 5, 1918
Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
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
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
When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
REBECCA WEST
The Paris Review, spring 1981
Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.
HANNAH ARENDT
interview, ZDF TV, Zur Person, October 28, 1964
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.
DON DELILLO
Conversations with Don DeLillo
When you finish one book, you don't want to just write the same book again.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Slate, October 10, 2011
Every writer is an iron-monger that melts down old junk into new steel.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
WHEN YOU LEAVE YOUR TYPEWRITER YOU LEAVE YOUR MACHINE GUN AND THE RATS COME POURING THROUGH.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man