WRITING QUOTES XI

quotations about writing

The privilege of being a writer is that you have this opportunity to slow down and to consider things.

CHRIS ABANI

interview, UTNE Reader, June 2010

Tags: Chris Abani


Great novelists are philosopher-novelists who write in images instead of arguments.

ALBERT CAMUS

The Myth of Sisyphus


A lot of novelists start late--Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

JAMES M. CAIN

The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978

Tags: James M. Cain


In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.

SAMUEL R. DELANY

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw


I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

SAM SHEPARD

The Observer, March 20, 2010

Tags: Sam Shepard


I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

interview with Oprah Winfrey, June 1, 2008


Every writer is an iron-monger that melts down old junk into new steel.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking

JANE HIRSHFIELD

"Sweater"

Tags: Jane Hirshfield


Writing is a part of healing, of digging into society.

KHALED KHALIFA

"Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa tells the stories of a bleeding, beautiful country", Syria Direct, March 23, 2017


The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn deep into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations.

CHINUA ACHEBE

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra


My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I'm grateful for it the way I'm grateful for the ocean.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

Tags: Anne Lamott


The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.

JAMES JOYCE

interview with Max Eastman, Harper's Magazine, 1929?

Tags: James Joyce


Everyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something which, though it lay within us, we failed clearly to recognize before.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook J", The Waste Books


A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook B", The Waste Books

Tags: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


Writing is -- at least for me -- movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen -- and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives -- on paper to boot! -- towards incarnation.

HEINRICH BÖLL

Nobel Lecture, May 2, 1973


Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

NORMAN MAILER

The New York Times, October 4, 2000


The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)

MARTIN AMIS

The Information


You might get the impression that I have a mild contempt for storytelling, which is only somewhat true. For example, I really like Agatha Christie. She obeys the rules of the genre at first, but then occasionally she manages to do very personal things. In my case, I think I start from the opposite point. At first, I don't obey, I don't plot, but then from time to time, I say to myself, Come on, there's got to be a story. I control myself. But I will never give up a beautiful fragment merely because it doesn't fit in the story.

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ

The Paris Review, fall 2010

Tags: Michel Houellebecq


Things that you write are in some degree autobiographical, but the first thing you find out about autobiography is that it's the hardest thing in the world to write. It's hard because it's very difficult to be absolutely factual about yourself. So ... when you write, you may draw on facts from your own life, but if their not in harmony with your story, they're worse than useless. You just stumble over them.

SAUL BELLOW

Q & A at Howard Community College, February 1986


He did not seem to know enough about the people in his novel. They did not seem to trust him.

JAMES BALDWIN

Another Country

Tags: James Baldwin