WRITING QUOTES XXI

quotations about writing

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997

Tags: John le Carré


With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

JAMES THURBER

New York Post, June 30, 1955

Tags: James Thurber


While I am writing, the sea's roar is coming up to me, and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once.

THOMAS MANN

Tonio Kröger


We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that's where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe.

TANITH LEE

"Love & Death & Publishers", Locus Magazine, April 1998

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We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

J. G. BALLARD

Crash

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To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Guardian, December 17, 2005

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The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

attributed, The Creative Compass: Writing Your Way from Inspiration to Publication


Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

MARCEL PROUST

Within a Budding Grove

Tags: Marcel Proust


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

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Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage--that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

The Art of Being Ruled

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If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays


I write from a thorough conviction that it is the duty of me, and with the belief that, after every drawback and shortcoming, I do my best, all things considered--that is for me, and, so being, the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope, in nowise affect me.

ROBERT BROWNING

letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 11, 1845

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I want to do something splendid ... something heroic or wonderful that won't be forgotten after I'm dead ... I think I shall write books.

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

Little Women

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I like to have a hero a little underpowered. I mean, Spiderman is far cooler than Superman. How do you challenge Superman?

PATRICIA BRIGGS

interview, Bitten by Books, March 30, 2010

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I couldn't imagine, and I don't say this with any pride, but I really couldn't imagine writing without a desperate deadline.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

The Paris Review, fall 2000


Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Mystery and Manners


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


All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

undated letter to his daughter "Scottie"

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald


After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

JEAN COCTEAU

The Paris Review, summer-fall, 1964


A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

attributed, The Twilight and Other Zones

Tags: John le Carré