quotations about writing
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
ALEXANDER POPE
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An Essay on Criticism
A serious writer is not to be confused with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Death in the Afternoon
I can't write five words but that I change seven.
DOROTHY PARKER
The Paris Review, summer 1956
I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.
KELLY LINK
interview, Electric Lit, February 6, 2015
If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.
HENRIK IBSEN
letter to Björnstjerne Björnson, September 12, 1865
Writing can't be a way of life -- the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
DORIS LESSING
Doris Lessing: Conversations
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
What I do as a writer, I work with situations, characters, certain situations and characters that appeal to me. And then, I try to imagine them and write the story that seems to flow from them. At a certain point, I can realize the themes are merging from this. But I never start from a thematic point of view, that I'm going to write about reinvention of self, identity, or any of these things. Usually, after the book is finished and I start talking about it, that it becomes analytical in that way. And in some ways it's a distortion of what the process has been, writing the book.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
interview, 3 AM Magazine
The public takes from a writer, or a writing, what it needs and lets the remainder go. But what they take is usually what they need least and what they let go is what they need most.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
WILLIAM H. GASS
A Temple of Texts
As we understand it, the surest way to make a living by the pen is to raise pigs.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
Some writers, of course, simply write, as they feel they are driven to do, by outer/inner inspirations. If, after the work is written and, hopefully, published, others respond -- that is the Champagne. But we, or some of us, don't write for the Champagne. We write because we write.
TANITH LEE
interview, Intergalactic Medicine Show
The right story needs the right telling.
JOHN GREEN
interview, Chicago Public Library
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
You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
ANITA BROOKNER
attributed, Journal for You, 2003
[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
Sometimes I pick up a book and I say: Well, so you've written it first, have you? Good for you. O.K., then I won't have to write it.
DORIS LESSING
The Golden Notebook
I truly believe that writing is a continuum--so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better.
CHRIS ABANI
interview, UTNE Reader, June 2010
Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
A Room of One's Own