quotations about writing
Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may draw on facts from your own life, but if their not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, February 1986
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
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
Writing is a part of healing, of digging into society.
KHALED KHALIFA
"Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa tells the stories of a bleeding, beautiful country", Syria Direct, March 23, 2017
The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques.
GLEN COOK
interview, SF Site, September 2005
You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Q&A: Anne Lamott", San Diego Magazine, January 27, 2014
Many writers are there that paint a stolen jade and sell it for a colt at the nearest fair.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
preface, Dr. Brodie's Report
Writer's block is only a failure of the ego.
NORMAN MAILER
attributed, A Writer's Time
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 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
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
Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978
I understood that my real problem with writing was not that I couldn't do it mentally. I couldn't do it physically. I could not sit still. Literally, could not sit still. So I had to solve that. I used some long scarves to tie myself into my chair. I tied myself in with a pack of cigarettes on one side and coffee on the other, and when I instinctively bolted upright after a few minutes, I'd say, Oh, shit. I'm tied down. I've got to keep writing.
LOUISE ERDRICH
The Paris Review, winter 2010
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
preface, The First Forty-Nine Stories
I try to write every day. I used to try to write four times a day, minimum of three sentences each time. It doesn't sound like much but it's kinda like the hare and the tortoise. If you try that several times a day you're going to do more than three sentences, one of them is going to catch on. You're going to say "Oh boy!" and then you just write. You fill up the page and the next page. But you have a certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say "Hey I wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each sentence is maybe twenty word long. That's 240 words which is a page of copy, so at least I didn't goof off completely today. I got a page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I've moved as far as I have."
ROGER ZELAZNY
interview, Phlogiston, 1995
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent with such frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.
JAMES BALDWIN
Notes of a Native Son
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
GRAHAM GREENE
New York Times, October 9, 1985
If you're writing about a character, if he's a powerful character, unless you give him vulnerability I don't think he'll be as interesting to the reader.
STAN LEE
interview, March 13, 2006
Writing, in whatever form, is your own personal progress report. There's nothing I love more than curling up with tea and reading back over my past, error-riddled posts. It's an indescribable connection that you simply can't get from a photo or memory alone. Think of it as the only true insight your future self has into you, as you are today. Blog for yourself and the rest will follow.
BIANCA BASS
"Why You Should Write (Even If It Feels Like Nobody Is Listening)", Huffington Post, February 29, 2016