WRITING QUOTES XX

quotations about writing

With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

JAMES THURBER

New York Post, June 30, 1955

Tags: James Thurber


After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

JEAN COCTEAU

The Paris Review, summer-fall, 1964


Learn to write well, or not to write at all.

JOHN DRYDEN

Essay on Satire

Tags: John Dryden


The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

attributed, The Creative Compass: Writing Your Way from Inspiration to Publication


If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

RAY BRADBURY

attributed, The Writer's Workout

Tags: Ray Bradbury


I always have the feeling that I'm never going to be able to write anything funny again. That's why I keep writing funny things. I have to prove to myself that I'm wrong.

RITA RUDNER

interview, Huffington Post, March 18, 2013

Tags: Rita Rudner


Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

ROBERT REED

Lincoln Journal Star, January 11, 2004


After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.

ROGER ZELAZNY

interview, Phlogiston, 1995

Tags: Roger Zelazny


After a few days of writing I am as happy to see people as if I've been marooned on a desert island for a month.

ROSEMARY JENKINSON

"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017


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


The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating, discovering. The journey is your narrative.

WALTER MOSLEY

This Year You Write Your Novel

Tags: Walter Mosley


I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

WILLIAM H. GASS

The Paris Review, summer 1977

Tags: William H. Gass


Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage--that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

The Art of Being Ruled

Tags: Wyndham Lewis


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

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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

Tags: Anne Lamott


Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse

Tags: Carlos Ruiz Zafon


If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays


When I was teaching -- I taught for a while -- my students would write as if they were raised by wolves. Or raised on the streets. They were middle-class kids and they were ashamed of their background. They felt like unless they grew up in poverty, they had nothing to write about. Which was interesting because I had always thought that poor people were the ones who were ashamed. But it's not. It's middle-class people who are ashamed of their lives. And it doesn't really matter what your life was like, you can write about anything. It's just the writing of it that is the challenge. I felt sorry for these kids, that they thought that their whole past was absolutely worthless because it was less than remarkable.

DAVID SEDARIS

January Magazine, June 2000

Tags: David Sedaris


Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche


There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

GEORGE ORWELL

Down and Out in Paris and London

Tags: George Orwell