quotations about writing
There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape.... The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
Sometimes I think that my best writing comes from exposing my fears and vulnerabilities and hoping that nobody notices it's about me.
VICTORIA LAURIE
Twitter post, October 13, 2014
Some people talk to themselves, and some people write, and somehow society has decided that one gets committed and one gets a paycheck.
BOB LONSBERRY
official website
My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Paris Review, summer 1977
I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, A. V. Club, June 17, 2011
I don't begin a novel with a shopping list--the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It's like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn't a violin. That's what I do when I'm writing a novel, except somehow I'm simultaneously generating the wood as I'm carving it.
WILLIAM GIBSON
The Paris Review, summer 2011
I believe so. In its beginning, dialogue's the easiest thing in the world to write when you have a good ear, which I think I have. But as it goes on, it's the most difficult, because it has so many ways to function. Sometimes I needed to make a speech do three or four or five things at once--reveal what the character said but also what he thought he said, what he hid, what others were going to think he meant, and what they misunderstood, and so forth--all in his single speech. And the speech would have to keep the essence of this one character, his whole particular outlook in concentrated form. This isn't to say I succeeded. But I guess it explains why dialogue gives me my greatest pleasure in writing.
EUDORA WELTY
The Paris Review, fall 1972
Fiction writing is like duck hunting. You go to the right place at the right time with the right dog. You get into the water before dawn, wearing a little protective gear, then you stand behind some reeds and wait for the story to present itself. This is not to say you are passive. You choose the place and the day. You pick the gun and the dog. You have the desire to blow the duck apart for reasons that are entirely your own. But you have to be willing to accept not what you wanted to have happen, but what happens. You have to write the story you find in the circumstances you've created, because more often than not the ducks don't show up. The hunters in the next blind begin to argue, and you realize they're in love. You see a snake swimming in your direction. Your dog begins to shiver and whine, and you start to think about this gun that belonged to your father. By the time you get out of the marsh, you will have written a novel so devoid of ducks it will shock you.
ANN PATCHETT
What Now?
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
While I am writing, the sea's roar is coming up to me, and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once.
THOMAS MANN
Tonio Kröger
When I am asked how or why I wrote this or that, I always find myself quite embarassed. I would gladly furnish not merely the questioner, but myself as well, with an exhaustive answer, but can never do so. I cannot recreate the context in its entirety, yet I wish that I could, so that at least the literature I myself make might be made slightly less of a mysterious process than bridge-building and bread-baking.
HEINRICH BÖLL
Nobel Lecture, May 2, 1973
Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past--it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases.
JOHN ASHBERY
interview, The Paris Review, winter 1983
The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit -- for gallantry in defeat -- for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.
JOHN STEINBECK
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1962
The truth I'm trying to convey is not a startling one, it is simply a peeling away of affectation. I use whatever gift I have to get behind the façade.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, 2012: Waking of the Prophets
The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer. The dictionary, a new word, a voyage, an encounter, a talk on the street, a book, a phrase learned.
ANAÏS NIN
attributed, French Writers of the Past
Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
Only the hunger for something beyond the personal will allow a writer to break free of one major obstacle to originality -- the fear of self-revelation.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration. You sit down, it helps your subconscious understand that it's time to start writing and to relax down into that well of dream material and memory and imagination. So, I sit down at the exact same time every day. And I let myself write really awful first drafts of things. I take very short assignments; I will capture for myself in a few words what I'm going to be trying to do that morning, or in that hour. Maybe I'm going to write a description of the lake out in Inverness in West Marin, where I live. And so I try to keep things really small and manageable. I have a one-inch picture frame on my desk so I can remember that that's all I'm going to be able to see in the course of an hour or two, and then I just let myself start and it goes really badly most mornings; as it does for most writers.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, Big Think, April 6, 2010