quotations about writing
Ideas are infinite--writers are hardwired to think that way. We keep it fresh by using new people, mixing character types and putting them in a different setting. It's always the first book all over again, but one idea can be told a thousand different ways. There are 88 keys on the piano, but you can make an infinite amount of music from those keys.
NORA ROBERTS
Time Magazine, November 29, 2007
I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.
ANN BEATTIE
Conversations with Ann Beattie
Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its power.
JOAN DIDION
Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations
For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint concept, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.
ISAAC ASIMOV
I, Asimov: A Memoir
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
attributed, Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer's Life
There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a sheet, as in riding across a country.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
I believe the first story I ever wrote was about a young girl who was terribly mistreated by her very cruel parents, and one day the girl fled to the woods to live amongst a pack of wolves. Hey, I was eleven, loved wolves, and had been grounded for what I felt was a minor infraction. Can you blame me?
VICTORIA LAURIE
Relate Magazine, April 1, 2011
There is probably no hell for authors in the next world--they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
"Furor Scribendi", Bloodchild and Other Stories
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
THOMAS WOLFE
Selections from the Works of Thomas Wolfe
Writing by hand, mouthing by mouth: in each case you get a very strong physical sense of the emergence of language--squeezed out like a well-formed stool--what satisfaction! what bliss!
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Paris Review, summer 1977
The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
The Paris Review, spring 1969
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A Moveable Feast
When you finish one book, you don't want to just write the same book again.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Slate, October 10, 2011
All writing, all art, is an act of faith. If one tries to contribute to human understanding, how can that be called decadent? It's like saying a declaration of love is an act of decadence. Any work of art, provide it springs from a sincere motivation to further understanding between people, is an act of faith and therefore is an act of love.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
Truman Capote: Conversations
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
KURT VONNEGUT
attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations
The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.
CHRIS ABANI
attributed, Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction
Novices in the art attain to finish of diction and precision of portraiture before they can construct the plot.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics