quotations about writing
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
To finish is sadness to a writer--a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Paris Review, fall 1975
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
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
The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating, discovering. The journey is your narrative.
WALTER MOSLEY
This Year You Write Your Novel
I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.
KIRBY LARSON
interview, Author Turf, March 6, 2014
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
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.
GEORGE ORWELL
Down and Out in Paris and London
Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down. The one hope for a writer is that although his enemies are often unseen they are seldom unheard. He must listen for the death-watch, listen for the faint toc-toc, the critic's truth sharpened by envy, the embarrassed praise of a sincere friend, the silence of gifted contemporaries, the implications of the don in the manger, the visitor in the small hours. He must dismiss the builders and contractors, elude the fans with an assumed name and dark glasses, force his way off the moving staircase, subject every thing he writes to a supreme critical court. Would it amuse Horace or Milton or Swift or Leopardi? Could it be read to Flaubert? Would it be chosen by the Infallible Worm, by the discriminating palates of the dead?
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Enemies of Promise
Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
JOHN DRYDEN
Essay on Satire
You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
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
If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
New York Times, April 19, 1992
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
WALTER BENJAMIN
One-Way Street
I hate writing, I love having written.
DOROTHY PARKER
attributed, Rhymes with Vain
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
The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Blue Girl
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