WRITING QUOTES VI

quotations about writing

For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint concept, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.

DAN SIMMONS

Hyperion


So basically, it's totally selfish why I write. There are more harmful ways to spend your time, is how I justify it I guess. If my stories can make others laugh, or make others feel unexpected and complicated emotions, well then it's more than feeling good, then it's a bonus, then its rewarding, then you're building community.

TYLER BARTON

"Millennial Writers on Writing", Huffington Post, February 16, 2016


Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.

MARTIN AMIS

Essays


For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next.

ST. AUGUSTINE

Confessions

Tags: St. Augustine


Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really.... I keep it out of print.

MORDECAI RICHLER

interview, Brick 81, 1989


Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Nobel Prize speech, December 10, 1954

Tags: Ernest Hemingway


Every experience shapes your writing, being stuck in a car on a lonely bridge, or dancing at a prom, being the it girl on the beach, all of those things influence your life, they influence how you write, and the topics you choose to write about.

MAYA ANGELOU

Facebook post, October 13, 2012

Tags: Maya Angelou


I think a good writer is a mix of confidence (sure that what they're writing is going to appeal to their readers) and uncertainty (what if all these words are crap?). If you're too confident, you get an attitude that seeps through into your writing, affecting the characters and the story. If you're too uncertain, you'll never finish anything.

CHARLES DE LINT

interview with Kim Antieau, April 28, 2008

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Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

interview, The Telegraph, August 31, 2010


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

Tags: John Banville


When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

KURT VONNEGUT

attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations

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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


You grow a whole lot more as a writer by getting old stories out of the house and letting new ones come in and live with you until they grow up and are ready to go. Don't let the old ones stay there and grow fat and cranky and eat all the food out of the refrigerator. You have dozens of generations of stories inside you, but the only way to make room for the new ones is to write the old ones and mail them off.

ORSON SCOTT CARD

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tags: Orson Scott Card


Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

DON DELILLO

Conversations with Don DeLillo


Each book starts from ashes.

PHILIP ROTH

interview with Cynthia Haven, "The Book Haven"

Tags: Philip Roth


All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

Truman Capote: Conversations

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I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

The Washington Post, November 13, 2009


The novelist is like the conductor of an orchestra, his back to the audience, his face invisible, summoning the experience of music for the people he cannot see. The writer as conductor also gets to compose the music and play all of the instruments, a task less formidable than it seems. What it requires is the conscious practice of providing an extraordinary experience for the reader, who should be oblivious to the fact that he is seeing words on paper.

SOL STEIN

Stein on Writing


I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.

TANITH LEE

Realms of Fantasy, August 2009

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I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.

ROBERT PENN WARREN

National Observer, March 12, 1977

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