quotations about writing
You become a serious novelist by living long enough.
DON DELILLO
Conversations with Don DeLillo
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
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
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
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
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
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
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