quotations about writing
I've increasingly been interested in leaving gaps and unresolved elements within a novel, trying to escape from the model of the novel as something in which there is a secret that, when revealed, will make all clear. It seems to me too unlike life, too convenient, too fictional.
ALAN HOLLINGHURST
The Paris Review, winter 2011
It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.
ELIZABETH STROUT
Newsweek, July 13, 2009
The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.
EUDORA WELTY
On Writing
[Writing is] hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
JOAN DIDION
The Paris Review, fall-winter 1978
The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.
ROBERT STONE
attributed, A Writer's Book of Days
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Criticism
Pay attention only to the form; emotion will come spontaneously to inhabit it. A perfect dwelling always finds an inhabitant. The artist's business is to build the dwelling; as for the inhabitant, it is up to the reader to provide him.
ANDRE GIDE
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
The New Statesman, February 25, 1933
Most writers -- poets in especial -- prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy -- an ecstatic intuition -- and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought -- at the true purposes seized only at the last moment -- at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view -- at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable -- at the cautious selections and rejections -- at the painful erasures and interpolations -- in a word, at the wheels and pinions -- the tackle for scene-shifting -- the step-ladders and demon-traps -- the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"
I'm such a slow writer I have no need for anything as fast as a word processor. I don't need anything so snappy. I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997
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
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
"Furor Scribendi", Bloodchild and Other Stories
Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.
ROBERT REED
Lincoln Journal Star, January 11, 2004
I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, February 1986
I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
SHANNON HALE
attributed, The Novel-Writing Plan
At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
foreword, Sweet Bird of Youth
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
THOMAS MANN
Essays of Three Decades
Writing sets off a spark in my heart, and I'm going to start a fire.
TIFFANY FERENTINI
"Millennial Writers on Writing", Huffington Post, February 16, 2016
The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
introduction, The Left Hand of Darkness