WRITING QUOTES XXII

quotations about writing

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

Tags: Kobo Abe


We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

J. G. BALLARD

Crash

Tags: J. G. Ballard


It's so easy to get into the same routine. A novel every two years; perhaps, improving technique. But I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in doing something fundamentally important--and therefore, it needs time. And what I've been doing, really, is avoiding this pressure to get into the habit of one novel a year. This is what is expected of novelists. And I have never been really too much concerned with doing what is expected of novelists, or writers, or artists. I want to do what I believe is important.

CHINUA ACHEBE

interview, Okike, 1990

Tags: Chinua Achebe


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

Tags: William Faulkner


The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

LAWRENCE BLOCK

Newsweek, July 13, 2009

Tags: Lawrence Block


I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The Paris Review, winter 2011


I'm a pretty autobiographical writer. I like a high ratio of true events to made-up events or rearranged events. I've always felt that if you think you can find a way to tell the truth and keep the fictional flux going, it's at least a good idea to try, because very often the truth is more interesting than the posed picture, the tableau. The messiness of truth is a useful corrective.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Paris Review, fall 2011

Tags: Nicholson Baker


I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, "Is he sick?" "No," my wife says, "he's writing something." I have to do it that way on account of my eyes. I still write occasionally--in the proper sense of the word--using black crayon on yellow paper and getting perhaps twenty words to the page. My usual method, though, is to spend the mornings turning over the text in my mind. Then in the afternoon, between two and five, I call in a secretary and dictate to her. I can do about two thousand words. It took me about ten years to learn.

JAMES THURBER

The Paris Review, fall 1955


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


You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.

KELLY LINK

"A Vampire is a Flexible Metaphor: An Interview with Kelly Link", Gigantic Magazine, October 23, 2013

Tags: Kelly Link


You have an idea in mind of what you want to achieve when you sit down to write something. It takes many years to accept that you will always fall short of that. Maybe now I can write the book that I might have had in mind five or twenty years ago. You're always lagging behind your best ideas.

TOBIAS WOLFF

The Missouri Review, 2003


I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

interview, A. V. Club, June 17, 2011

Tags: Fran Lebowitz


Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.

MARKUS ZUSAK

"Why I Write", The Guardian, March 28, 2008


I write fiction and I'm told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn't.

PHILIP ROTH

Deception: A Novel


After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.

ROGER ZELAZNY

interview, Phlogiston, 1995

Tags: Roger Zelazny


The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it."

EDWARD ALBEE

interview with Digby Diehl, 1963


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"

Tags: Walter Bargen


Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Tags: Friedrich Nietzsche


Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light -- and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau -- into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

NADINE GORDIMER

Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1991

Tags: Nadine Gordimer


I like to have a hero a little underpowered. I mean, Spiderman is far cooler than Superman. How do you challenge Superman?

PATRICIA BRIGGS

interview, Bitten by Books, March 30, 2010

Tags: Patricia Briggs