quotations about writing
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
He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.
J. D. SALINGER
attributed, Salinger: A Biography
As things stand now, I am going to be a writer. I'm not sure that I'm going to be a good one or even a self-supporting one, but until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says "you are nothing," I will be a writer.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Gonzo
Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
As the deadline looms, my quality of writing is in danger of declining all because I just had to check my email.
GERI SPIELER
"The Dangers of Distracted Writing", Huffington Post, February 28, 2016
When you're telling a story, you've got to give details.
GAO XINGJIAN
Dialogue and Rebuttal
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Paris Review, spring 1958
He that writes to himself, writes to an eternal public.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.
EDMUND BURKE
Reflections on the Revolution in France
I met a young woman the other day, and she said, what advice would you have for a writer, and I said it would be to work every day. But then she said, and how do you get to know someone like Ira Glass? And I said, that's not the point. You don't befriend people for that reason. I was just lucky and Ira happened to be in a place where I was reading one night and heard me read. I didn't invite him to come there. If I had gone out of my way to invite him, he probably wouldn't have come. Your job is to write. The rest of it will take care of itself. But, generally, it seems ... you know how that is, you meet people and they have a talent for self-promotion. Those are the pushy people. And you know their writing's not going to be any good, because that's not their talent.
DAVID SEDARIS
Oasis Magazine, June 2008
My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration. You sit down, it helps your subconscious understand that it's time to start writing and to relax down into that well of dream material and memory and imagination. So, I sit down at the exact same time every day. And I let myself write really awful first drafts of things. I take very short assignments; I will capture for myself in a few words what I'm going to be trying to do that morning, or in that hour. Maybe I'm going to write a description of the lake out in Inverness in West Marin, where I live. And so I try to keep things really small and manageable. I have a one-inch picture frame on my desk so I can remember that that's all I'm going to be able to see in the course of an hour or two, and then I just let myself start and it goes really badly most mornings; as it does for most writers.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, Big Think, April 6, 2010
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
Getting even is one great reason for writing.... But getting even isn't necessarily vicious. There are two ways of getting even: one is destructive and the other is restorative. It depends on how the scales are weighted.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Paris Review, summer 1977
If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
A Story Teller's Story
I have no pleasure in writing myself--none, in the mere act--though all pleasure in the sense of fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other.
ROBERT BROWNING
letter to Elizabeth Barrett, March 12, 1845
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of--but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
To me the question is always this: if a ray of light came out of the sky and said, "Your next book will never be published -- would you still write it?" If the answer is yes, the book is worth writing.
MARKUS ZUSAK
"Why I Write", The Guardian, March 28, 2008
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin