WRITING QUOTES XXIII

quotations about writing

I'm a pretty autobiographical writer. I like a high ratio of true events to made-up events or rearranged events. I've always felt that if you think you can find a way to tell the truth and keep the fictional flux going, it's at least a good idea to try, because very often the truth is more interesting than the posed picture, the tableau. The messiness of truth is a useful corrective.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Paris Review, fall 2011

Tags: Nicholson Baker


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


You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.

KELLY LINK

"A Vampire is a Flexible Metaphor: An Interview with Kelly Link", Gigantic Magazine, October 23, 2013

Tags: Kelly Link


My plots are always rudimentary. Whatever I've accomplished certainly does not depend on my virtuosity with plot. Generally I don't even have a plot. What happens is that my characters engage in an action, and out of that action little bits of plot sometimes adhere to the narrative. I never have to worry about lifting a plot, because I don't conceive of a book that way.

NORMAN MAILER

The Paris Review, winter-spring 1964


Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook D", Aphorisms

Tags: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.

WILLIAM H. GASS

On Being Blue


You have an idea in mind of what you want to achieve when you sit down to write something. It takes many years to accept that you will always fall short of that. Maybe now I can write the book that I might have had in mind five or twenty years ago. You're always lagging behind your best ideas.

TOBIAS WOLFF

The Missouri Review, 2003


The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. It's incredibly annoying for us scribblers.

IAIN M. BANKS

"Iain Banks: The Final Interview", The Guardian, June 14, 2013

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There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word--tension--has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end--is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

"Everything is more complicated than you think", The Economist, November 14, 2011

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Writing is a weird thing because we can read, we know how to write a sentence. It's not like a trumpet where you have to get some skill before you can even produce a sound. It's misleading because it's hard to make stories. It seems like it should be easy to do but it's not. The more you write, the better you're going to get. Write and write and write. Try not to be hard on yourself.

GAIL CARSON LEVINE

interview, RIF Reading Planet

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I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

The Paris Review, summer 1993

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You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

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Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light -- and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau -- into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

NADINE GORDIMER

Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1991

Tags: Nadine Gordimer


The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.

ANAÏS NIN

The Diary of Anaïs Nin


I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry. I have a dog now, and I have to remember to walk him. When I write, that takes over and I can't do anything else. There's something exciting about that free fall, but then my life gets really screwed up. I've lost lots of relationships because of my having to ignore everything.

ADAM RAPP

interview, Theatre Communications Group

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However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.

DONALD BARTHELME

"Not-Knowing"


I've increasingly been interested in leaving gaps and unresolved elements within a novel, trying to escape from the model of the novel as something in which there is a secret that, when revealed, will make all clear. It seems to me too unlike life, too convenient, too fictional.

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

The Paris Review, winter 2011


The process of creating is related to the process of dreaming although when you are writing you're doing it and when you're dreaming, it's doing you.

ROBERT STONE

attributed, A Writer's Book of Days


Much modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, etcetera. But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there. I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice. I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

MARTIN AMIS

The Paris Review, spring 1998


I didn't do anything as active as deciding that I wanted to be a writer. For one thing, I didn't feel like I was the final authority on whether or not I was anything like a writer. (I'm a timid soul.) I just kept writing stories, because becoming a veterinarian seemed as if it involved too much dissection.

KELLY LINK

"Words by Flashlight", Sybil's Garage, June 7, 2006

Tags: Kelly Link