WRITING QUOTES XX

quotations about writing

I write from a thorough conviction that it is the duty of me, and with the belief that, after every drawback and shortcoming, I do my best, all things considered--that is for me, and, so being, the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope, in nowise affect me.

ROBERT BROWNING

letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 11, 1845

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The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO

Six Characters in Search of an Author

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It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

LOUISE ERDRICH

The Paris Review, winter 2010


I want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead ... I think I shall write books.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

Little Women

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So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.

KOBO ABE

The Face of Another

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Well, I don't ever leave out details, in that I don't come up with information or description which I don't then use. I only ever come up with what seems to me absolutely essential to make the story work. I'm not usually an overwriter. As I revise, it's usually a matter of adding in as much vivid details as seem necessary to make the story come clear without slowing down the momentum of the story.

KELLY LINK

interview, Apex Magazine, July 2, 2013

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Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big.... This is a trophy brought back from the further realm, the kingdom of perpetual glistening night where we know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall.

KATE BRAVERMAN

attributed, From Book to Bestseller


The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit -- for gallantry in defeat -- for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.

JOHN STEINBECK

Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1962


Only the hunger for something beyond the personal will allow a writer to break free of one major obstacle to originality -- the fear of self-revelation.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

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I couldn't imagine, and I don't say this with any pride, but I really couldn't imagine writing without a desperate deadline.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

The Paris Review, fall 2000


A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair

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Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Mystery and Manners


The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

EUGENE IONESCO

Present Past / Past Present

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It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Nobel Prize speech, December 10, 1954


There is a realm of possible knowledge which can be reached by artists, which is not susceptible of mathematical verification but which is true. This is sometimes spoken as the ineffable. If there is any word I detest in the language, this would be it, but the fact that it exists, the word ineffable, is suspicious in that it suggests that there might be something that is ineffable. And I believe that that's the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful, they reach it.

DONALD BARTHELME

"A Symposium of Fiction"


If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

New York Times, April 19, 1992

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I tend to be very much a planner. I mean obviously details veer in the telling all the time, that's clearly the case, but in terms of the broad architecture of a book I plot carefully and if things start to veer halfway through, I tend to stop and either pull them back on course, or if I realize they are going in a better direction, I extrapolate and work out what effect this is going to have further down. I am not one of these writers who is able to enjoy flying by the sit of my pants. And there's no value judgment there, incidentally. I am very well aware that some absolutely fantastic, wonderful writers do that. For me, no, I cannot do it. I have to plan quite meticulously.

CHINA MIÉVILLE

"In a Carapace of Light: A Conversation with China Miéville", Clarkesworld


First, think in as homely a way as you can; next, shove your pen under the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction.

CHARLES READE

Peg Woffington

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

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse

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Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Paris Review, spring 1956

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