WRITING QUOTES XXIV

quotations about writing

I'm sympathetic with new writers who focus so much on the beginning. That's what you show friends or beta readers to see if you are just wasting your time or if there's something there. But you won't really know until you finish the whole book.

JEFF ABBOTT

"Rules of Fiction with Jeff Abbott", Suspense Magazine, January 19, 2017

Tags: Jeff Abbott


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


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


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


I think I have spoken before about the writer, the artist being a kind of dredging net going down into the rich silt of the mind, of the spirit, to bring up things that are normally out of reach or not accessible to consciousness. It's the duty of the writer -- and indeed of all artists -- to think long and deeply and to be able to drill down into those substrata so that these contents are released. Also, I think that as you drill down there is a release in all of the senses because great pressures build up in people and they don't know why. Quite often something very simple, a way of elucidating it, a way of telling the story, can release that and relieve it and make them feel, Yes, that's what is happening to me, or, This is how I feel. Then immediately one is taken off that horrible little rock of chaos where one is entirely alone and brought back into the community.

JEANETTE WINTERSON

The Paris Review, winter 1997

Tags: Jeanette Winterson


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


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


It's a principle of mine to come into the story as late as possible, and to tell it as fast as you can.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

interview, The Paris Review, summer 1997

Tags: John le Carré


Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

Theme and Plot

Tags: Yevgeny Zamyatin


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


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"

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe


If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.

SHERWOOD ANDERSON

A Story Teller's Story

Tags: Sherwood Anderson


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

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook D", Aphorisms

Tags: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


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

Tags: Roald Dahl


As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

Tags: Aristotle


I hate writing, I love having written.

DOROTHY PARKER

attributed, Rhymes with Vain


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


The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

The New Russian Prose

Tags: Yevgeny Zamyatin


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 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

Tags: Fran Lebowitz