WRITING QUOTES IV
quotations about writing
To me, writing is not a profession. You might as well call living a profession. Or having children. Anything you can't help doing.
VICKI BAUM
I Know What I'm Worth
No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
My Day
When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don't choose what kind of story it is or what's going to happen. I just wait.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Paris Review, summer 2004
Writing is a profession you can practice while upside down and experiencing total blackout in a cave. You just use the mental recorder instead of pen and paper ... or portable ... and hope you find a use for the experience.
C. J. CHERRYH
interview, SFF World, January 1, 2000
Irish English is a very different beast from English English or American English. Very different. The way in which Irish writers are only too happy to infuse their language with ambiguity is very different. An English writer will try to be clear. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass. The Irish writer would say: 'No no, it's a lens, it distorts everything.'
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
I seldom have a firm plot or any idea at all about the ending. But there is a clear, almost mathematically conceptual idea that determines length--the length or brevity of a literary work being comparable to the size of the frame needed by a picture.
HEINRICH BÖLL
The Paris Review, spring 1983
Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On Paraguay"
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A Moveable Feast
It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
A writer is a reader moved to emulation.
SAUL BELLOW
attributed, The Hidden Writer
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
UMBERTO ECO
postscript, The Name of the Rose
Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
The Paris Review, spring 1969
When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.
ELIF BATUMAN
interview, The Rumpus, April 25, 2012
The interesting thing is that I rarely look at the outline once I've done it. And when I read the outline once I've written the novel, I realize I've written a totally different book.
JONATHAN KELLERMAN
"Novelist explains how psychology training honed his writing", USC News, February 25, 2016
Cautious men have many adverbs, "usually," "nearly," "almost ": safe men begin, " it may be advanced " : you never know precisely what their premises are, nor what their conclusion is; they go tremulously like a timid rider; they turn hither and thither; they do not go straight across a subject, like a masterly mind.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Memoirs
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
attributed, Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer's Life
There would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief
Writing is -- at least for me -- movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen -- and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives -- on paper to boot! -- towards incarnation.
HEINRICH BÖLL
Nobel Lecture, May 2, 1973
Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.
TOBSHA LEARNER
interview, Booktopia, February 22, 2011