WRITING QUOTES XIV

quotations about writing

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

interview, Ruminator Magazine, August/September 2005

Tags: Fran Lebowitz


Just as the light and weightless vegetation of saltpeter floats over the old walls of houses as soon as the owner gets careless, so the literary vocation springs up in you.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

letter to Jose Bello, summer 1925

Tags: Federico Garcia Lorca


I wrote without much effort; for I was rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing.

JANE AUSTEN

letter to Cassandra Austen, June 20, 1808

Tags: Jane Austen


I really believe there are many excellent writers who have never written because they never could begin. This is especially the case of people of great sensitiveness, or of people of advanced education. Professors suffer most of all from this inhibition. Many of them carry their unwritten books to the grave. They overestimate the magnitude of the task, they overestimate the greatness of the final result. A child in a prep school will write the History of Greece and fetch it home finished after school. "He wrote a fine History of Greece the other day," says his fond father. Thirty years later the child, grown to be a professor, dreams of writing the History of Greece -- the whole of it from the first Ionic invasion of the Aegean to the downfall of Alexandria. But he dreams. He never starts. He can't. It's too big. Anybody who has lived around a college knows the pathos of those unwritten books.

STEPHEN LEACOCK

How to Write

Tags: Stephen Leacock


He who only writes to suit the taste of the age, considers himself more than his writings. We should always aim at perfection, and then posterity will do us that justice which sometimes our contemporaries refuse us.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères

Tags: Jean de La Bruyere


Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

EDWARD ALBEE

Saturday Review, May 4, 1966


"Writing" is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.

LAWRENCE LESSIG

Wikimania 2006

Tags: Lawrence Lessig


Writing groups are the best things to happen to a writer since the invention of spell check. (I rely heavily on both so I would know.)

DASHA FAYVINOVA

"9 Reasons Joining A Writing Group Is One Of The Best Ways A Writer Can Grow", Bustle, February 8, 2016


When I write, I write because a thing has to be done. I don't think a writer should meddle too much with his own work. He should let the work write itself.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967


When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.

MARTIN AMIS

"The Past Gets Bigger and the Future Shrinks", Los Angeles Review of Books, July 21, 2013

Tags: Martin Amis


There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

Don Quixote

Tags: Miguel de Cervantes


The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

JOHN STEINBECK

New York Times, June 2, 1969

Tags: John Steinbeck


The industry is a terrible, cold place run by people who love to tear writers apart. Rejection is the norm, which means writing is the act of falling madly, deeply in love with your characters and story, even knowing you'll probably get your heart broken for it.

COREY MANDELL

"Beware the Writing Zombies", Huffington Post, February 25, 2016


Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?

EUDORA WELTY

On Writing


It's not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us--a book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth between times--as different from each other as those other creatures--jellyfish, aren't they, of a kind?--where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness.

EDITH WHARTON

"The Legend", Tales of Men and Ghosts

Tags: Edith Wharton


In secluding himself too much from society, an author is in danger of losing that intimate acquaintance with life which is the only sure foundation of power in a writer.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought

Tags: Christian Nestell Bovee


In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

preface, The First Forty-Nine Stories


If there's a character type I despise, it's the all-capable, all-knowing, physically perfect protagonist. My idea of hell would be to be trapped in a four-hundred page, first-person, first-tense, running monologue with a character like that. I think writers who produce characters along those lines should graduate from high school and move on.

CRAIG JOHNSON

"A Conversation with Craig Johnson", The Cold Dish

Tags: Craig Johnson


If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

JOHN DOS PASSOS

New York Times, October 25, 1959

Tags: John Dos Passos


I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously--that I'm seeing it in one flash. But in the working-out, the writing-out, infinite surprises happen. Thank God, because the surprise, the twist, the phrase that comes at the right moment out of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, that joyful little push that keeps a writer going.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

The Paris Review, spring-summer 1957