quotations about writing
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, Bad TV: The Very Best of the Very Worst
Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.
JACK LONDON
"Getting Into Print", Editor magazine, 1903
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
GRAHAM GREENE
New York Times, October 9, 1985
"Writing" is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
Wikimania 2006
Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
ANN PATCHETT
Truth and Beauty
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
With films, I just scribble a couple of notes for a scene. You don't have to do any writing at all, you just have your notes for the scene, which are written with the actors and the camera in mind. The actual script is a necessity for casting and budgeting, but the end product often doesn't bear much resemblance to the script--at least in my case.
WOODY ALLEN
The Paris Review, fall 1995
Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"A Message About Messages", CBC Magazine
When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997
This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Blue Girl
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.
ANAÏS NIN
The Diary of Anaïs Nin
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.
GRAHAM GREENE
New York Times, October 9, 1985
My approach to revision hasn't changed much over the years. I know there are writers who do it as they go along, but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist's most insidious enemy, which is doubt.
STEPHEN KING
foreword, The Gunslinger
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Paris Review, summer 1977
I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
MARTIN AMIS
The Paris Review, spring 1998
I didn't want to be ignored. I didn't want my books to be ignored. But I didn't really care to cut such a figure either because ... well, it interferes with the business of writing.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, February 1986
Dear Aspiring Author; Write with heart. Put that open, honest, bare soul on paper.
VICTORIA LAURIE
Twitter post, December 3, 2014
As we understand it, the surest way to make a living by the pen is to raise pigs.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs