WRITING QUOTES XXVI

quotations about writing

The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.

GRAHAM GREENE

New York Times, October 9, 1985


Someone watches over us when we write. Mother. Teacher. Shakespeare. God.

MARTIN AMIS

London Fields

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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

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Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.

J. D. SALINGER

attributed, Salinger: A Biography


Gotta have a head like a wrecking ball, a spirit like one of them punching clown dummies that always weeble-wobbles back up to standing. This takes time. Stories need to find the right home, the right audience. Stick with it. Quitting is for sad pandas.

CHUCK WENDIG

250 Things You Should Know About Writing

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Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.

ANN PATCHETT

Truth and Beauty

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Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Letters

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Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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I've found it incredibly helpful to make writing a routine. I don't sit down with the intention of creating an article that goes viral or some savvy sales page. I sit down and force myself to get my thoughts out on paper or in my laptop. If we choose the same time everyday our physiology is automatically going to start getting prepared to allow thoughts to flow to paper. After awhile of doing this you might even find that your ideas start coming to you shortly before you're scheduled writing time. I've found myself skipping my morning tea because I had such great ideas/thoughts and wanted to quickly get them out of my head and onto paper.

DANIELLE SABRINA

"5 Habits Holding You Back From Creating Great Content", Huffington Post, February 29, 2016


Writing sets off a spark in my heart, and I'm going to start a fire.

TIFFANY FERENTINI

"Millennial Writers on Writing", Huffington Post, February 16, 2016


From the moment I start a new novel, life's just one endless torture. The first few chapters may go fairly well and I may feel there's still a chance to prove my worth, but that feeling soon disappears and every day I feel less and less satisfied. I begin to say the book's no good, far inferior to my earlier ones, until I've wrung torture out of every page, every sentence, every word, and the very commas begin to look excruciatingly ugly. Then, when it's finished, what a relief! Not the blissful delight of the gentleman who goes into ecstasies over his own production, but the resentful relief of a porter dropping a burden that's nearly broken his back ... Then it starts all over again, and it'll go on starting all over again till it grinds the life out of me, and I shall end my days furious with myself for lacking talent, for not leaving behind a more finished work, a bigger pile of books, and lie on my death-bed filled with awful doubts about the task I've done, wondering whether it was as it ought to have been, whether I ought not to have done this or that, expressing my last dying breath the wish that I might do it all over again!

ÉMILE ZOLA

The Masterpiece

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What I cannot thus eliminate, what I must, head down, eyes shut, with the courage of a battalion and the blindness of a bull, charge and disperse are, indubitably, the figures behind the ferns, commercial travellers. There I've hidden them all this time in the hope that somehow they'd disappear, or better still emerge, as indeed they must, if the story's to go on gathering richness and rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with it two, if not three, commercial travellers and a whole grove of aspidistra.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

"An Unfinished Novel", The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf

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Whenever they tell me children want this sort of book and children need this sort of writing, I am going to smile politely and shut my earlids. I am a writer, not a caterer. There are plenty of caterers. But what children most want and need is what we and they don't know they want and don't think they need, and only writers can offer it to them.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

"A Message About Messages", CBC Magazine

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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

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Remember that in today's market, distribution and promotion are as important as craft. But don't forget what made you want to write fiction. If it was for the money, you're in the wrong business!

ELIZABETH ZELVIN

interview, Book Browsing, July 26, 2012

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In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you won't see for years, and can't be sure you'll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.

TOBIAS WOLFF

In Pharaoh's Army


One never knows enough about characters in real life to put them into novels. One gets started and then, suddenly, one can not remember what toothpaste they use; what are their views on interior decoration, and one is stuck utterly. No, major characters emerge; minor ones may be photographed.

GRAHAM GREENE

The Paris Review, autumn 1953


The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

RAY BRADBURY

Fahrenheit 451


Genre categories are irrelevant. I dislike them, but I do not have the casting vote. Writing is writing and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

TANITH LEE

Tabula Rasa, October 1994


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