quotations about writing
Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote. Writing is writing and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?
TANITH LEE
Tabula Rasa, October 1994
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
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"
Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Theme and Plot
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
ROALD DAHL
Boy
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success -- but only if you persist.
ISAAC ASIMOV
attributed, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead
Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted.
GERALD ASHER
speech at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, February 2011
Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978
What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Fiction Writers Review, April 5, 2009
Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The Paris Review, spring 1958
There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE
Barchester Towers
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
WILLIAM H. GASS
A Temple of Texts
The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.
ROBERT STONE
attributed, A Writer's Book of Days
The greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
MARTIN AMIS
London Fields
No reason at all why one should go on writing just for the sake of it. I think it is very important to stop when you haven't got anything to say.
JULIAN BARNES
The Paris Review, winter 2000
Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
Letters
It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997
In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia