quotations about writing
What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.
ROBERT STONE
The Paris Review, winter 1985
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
Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.
MARTIN AMIS
London Fields
So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
The truth I'm trying to convey is not a startling one, it is simply a peeling away of affectation. I use whatever gift I have to get behind the façade.
ANITA BROOKNER
The Paris Review, fall 1987
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
THOMAS WOLFE
The Autobiography of an American Novelist
You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success -- but only if you persist.
ISAAC ASIMOV
attributed, How to Become a Famous Writer Before You're Dead
Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before any thing be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"
As far back as I can remember, I've been writing. I've always had this wild imagination, and I love to embellish stories to make them more interesting. When I was a kid I had all these intricate histories for all my stuffed animals and dollhouse families, which I would type out on this old manual typewriter my parents set up for me in the corner of our TV room. I kept writing all through middle school, and in high school I got diverted a bit, but I picked it up again in college. I really didn't think I'd actually be a writer until I graduated and found that I just couldn't stop and go get a real job. Every time I finished something, another idea would follow right behind. So I went into waitressing and just wrote like crazy. At times it seemed really stupid, since I was totally broke and there was no kind of guarantee that I'd ever see anything come of it. Luckily, it did. But even if I hadn't sold a book by now I'd still be writing. It becomes a part of you, just something you do.
SARAH DESSEN
interview, Puffin Books
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
Writing is an act of blind faith that out there, somewhere, someone will read and enjoy, understand.
JAMES V. SCHALL
"The Creative Catholic: Fr. James V. Schall S.J. on the art and vocation of writing", Catholic World Report, March 27, 2017
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.
ROALD DAHL
Boy
Brevity is the sister of talent.
ANTON CHEKHOV
letter to A. P. Chekhov, April 11, 1889
Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
SAUL BELLOW
Nobel lecture, December 12, 1976
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words.
WILLIAM H. GASS
A Temple of Texts
I realized that I wanted to be a writer. But I wasn't sure I would be until I was fifteen or so. At that time I had immodestly started sending stories to magazines and literary quarterlies. Of course no writer ever forgets his first acceptance; but one fine day when I was seventeen, I had my first, second, and third, all in the same morning's mail. Oh, I'm here to tell you, dizzy with excitement is no mere phrase!
TRUMAN CAPOTE
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1957
You will always have days when you feel like an amateur. When it feels like everybody else is better than you. You will have this nagging suspicion that someone will eventually find you out, call you on your bullshit, realize you're the literary equivalent of a vagrant painting on the side of a wall with a piece of calcified poop. You will have days when the blank page is like being lost in a blizzard. You will sometimes hate what you wrote today, yesterday, or ten years ago. Bad days are part of the package. You just have to shut them out, swaddle your head in tinfoil, and keep writing anyway.
CHUCK WENDIG
The Kick-Ass Writer
I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
The Paris Review, winter 2011
I've gotten a little superstitious about listening to music when I write. Once a story is going somewhere, I keep listening to the same music whenever I work on that story. It seems to help me keep in voice, and alternatively, if I need to make some kind of dramatic shift, I'll go and put on something different to shake myself awake.
KELLY LINK
"Words by Flashlight", Sybil's Garage, June 7, 2006
The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.
WILLIAM GIBSON
Twitter post, May 31, 2009