WRITING QUOTES XXXIII

quotations about writing

You become a serious novelist by living long enough.

DON DELILLO

Conversations with Don DeLillo

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Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Table-Talk

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I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.

KELLY LINK

interview, Electric Lit, February 6, 2015

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You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

ANITA BROOKNER

attributed, Journal for You, 2003


Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.

J. D. SALINGER

attributed, Salinger: A Biography


At one time I used to keep notebooks with outlines for stories. But I found doing this somehow deadened the idea in my imagination. If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can't forget it--it will haunt you till it's written.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

The Paris Review, spring-summer 1957

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Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of--but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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I'm never lonely when I'm writing, because you live with the characters that are so alive in your mind. And you really see them and know them and get to be friends with them.

JULIE ANDREWS

interview, American Libraries Magazine

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When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.

GAO XINGJIAN

Dialogue and Rebuttal


When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

NICHOLSON BAKER

interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013

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To me the question is always this: if a ray of light came out of the sky and said, "Your next book will never be published -- would you still write it?" If the answer is yes, the book is worth writing.

MARKUS ZUSAK

"Why I Write", The Guardian, March 28, 2008


The great thing for me, now, is that writing has become more and more interesting. Not just as a craft but as a way into things that are not described. It's a thing of discovering. That's when writing is really working. You're on the trail of something and you don't quite know what it is.

SAM SHEPARD

The Observer, March 20, 2010