quotations about writing
Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
interview, SF Site, April 2001
I think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us, and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it? That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them and as they are.
MARKUS ZUSAK
"On Top of His Game: SLJ Interviews Margaret A. Edwards Award Winner Markus Zusak", School Library Journal, June 2, 2014
I hate writing, I love having written.
DOROTHY PARKER
attributed, Rhymes with Vain
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
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?
DAVID SEDARIS
Oasis Magazine, June 2008
With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
JAMES THURBER
New York Post, June 30, 1955
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
attributed, Literary Agents: How to Get & Work with the Right One for You
If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Enemies of Promise
Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse
Writing is a kind of centering, a kind of meditation. I find it to be profoundly rewarding. Actually, I'm an addict. If I go too long, and so far that hasn't been longer than a week, I start to feel unsettled, nervous. I begin to feel that I'm not engaged, a disconnection is threatening my world, that I'm being passed by and I'm both failing myself and the world by not writing about it.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"
In the end, the secret of writing is to be a tortoise, not a hare.
JONATHAN KELLERMAN
"Novelist explains how psychology training honed his writing", USC News, February 25, 2016
While I am writing, the sea's roar is coming up to me, and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once.
THOMAS MANN
Tonio Kröger
If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, The Writer's Workout
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
After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.
JEAN COCTEAU
The Paris Review, summer-fall, 1964
I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
My approach to revision hasn't changed much over the years. I know there are writers who do it as they go along, but my method of attack has always been to plunge in and go as fast as I can, keeping the edge of my narrative blade as sharp as possible by constant use, and trying to outrun the novelist's most insidious enemy, which is doubt.
STEPHEN KING
foreword, The Gunslinger