WRITING QUOTES XI

quotations about writing

Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

interview, Associated Press, 2003


The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)

MARTIN AMIS

The Information


The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

CHRIS ABANI

interview, UTNE Reader, June 2010

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The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.

JAMES JOYCE

interview with Max Eastman, Harper's Magazine, 1929?

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Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

JAMES JOYCE

letter to Fanny Guillermet, September 5, 1918

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To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

MARK TWAIN

"How to Tell a Story"

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If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

JOHN DOS PASSOS

New York Times, October 25, 1959

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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


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

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When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.

REBECCA WEST

The Paris Review, spring 1981

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The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

The Paris Review, fall 2000


Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

NORMAN MAILER

The New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1965

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One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

CHARLES SIMIC

The Unemployed Fortune-Teller

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I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

DAVID GERROLD

A Matter For Men

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A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook B", The Waste Books

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I never had a plan, except to write. I love what I do, and have from the beginning. Loving what you do makes it a lot easier to work, every day, to face the tough spots and heel in for the long haul. Nothing against plans; they work for some people. But for me, if I'd been planning, worrying about numbers, trying to micro-manage my career, I wouldn't have focused on the writing. If you don't write, you're not read. If you're not read, you don't sell. So that's my Master Plan, I guess. Write the books, let the agent agent, the editor edit, the publisher publish.

NORA ROBERTS

interview, inReads, October 5, 2011


The reason I write so slowly is because I try never to leave a sentence until it's as perfect as I can make it. So there isn't a word in any of my books that hasn't been gone over 40 times.

TOM ROBBINS

"In the Creative Process with Tom Robbins; Perfect Sentences, Imperfect Universe", New York Times, December 30, 1993

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Writers are made--forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities.

CHUCK WENDIG

250 Things You Should Know About Writing

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I really believe there are many excellent writers who have never written because they never could begin. This is especially the case of people of great sensitiveness, or of people of advanced education. Professors suffer most of all from this inhibition. Many of them carry their unwritten books to the grave. They overestimate the magnitude of the task, they overestimate the greatness of the final result. A child in a prep school will write the History of Greece and fetch it home finished after school. "He wrote a fine History of Greece the other day," says his fond father. Thirty years later the child, grown to be a professor, dreams of writing the History of Greece -- the whole of it from the first Ionic invasion of the Aegean to the downfall of Alexandria. But he dreams. He never starts. He can't. It's too big. Anybody who has lived around a college knows the pathos of those unwritten books.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

How to Write

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He that writes to himself, writes to an eternal public.

ELIZA COOK

Diamond Dust

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