WRITING QUOTES XIX

quotations about writing

The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit -- for gallantry in defeat -- for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.

JOHN STEINBECK

Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1962


Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big.... This is a trophy brought back from the further realm, the kingdom of perpetual glistening night where we know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall.

KATE BRAVERMAN

attributed, From Book to Bestseller


So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.

KOBO ABE

The Face of Another

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The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO

Six Characters in Search of an Author

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Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook

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Everybody writes a book too many.

MORDECAI RICHLER

"Sayings of the Week", The Observor, January 9, 1985

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In creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.

ORSON SCOTT CARD

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy


I always have the feeling that I'm never going to be able to write anything funny again. That's why I keep writing funny things. I have to prove to myself that I'm wrong.

RITA RUDNER

interview, Huffington Post, March 18, 2013

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I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

SYLVIA PLATH

The Journals of Sylvia Plath

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When I write, I go to live inside the book. By which I mean, mentally I can experience everything I'm writing about. I can see it, hear its sounds, feel its heat or rain. The characters become better known to me than the closest family or friends. This makes the writing-down part very simple most of the time. I only need to describe what's already there in front of me. That said, it won't be a surprise if I add that the imagined worlds quickly become entangled with the so-called reality of this one. Since I write almost every day, and I think (and dream) constantly about my work, it occurs to me I must spend more time in all these places than here.

TANITH LEE

author's note, Wolf Tower


The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. It cheapens and degrades the human experience, when it should inspire and elevate.

TOM WAITS

"Strange Innocence", Vanity Fair, July 2001

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Getting even is one great reason for writing.... But getting even isn't necessarily vicious. There are two ways of getting even: one is destructive and the other is restorative. It depends on how the scales are weighted.

WILLIAM H. GASS

The Paris Review, summer 1977


The chief advantage that ancient writers can boast over modern ones, seems owing to simplicity. Every noble truth and sentiment was expressed by the former in the natural manner; in word and phrase, simple, perspicuous, and incapable of improvement. What then remained for later writers but affectation, witticism, and conceit?

WILLIAM SHENSTONE

Essays on Men and Manners


Fiction writing is like duck hunting. You go to the right place at the right time with the right dog. You get into the water before dawn, wearing a little protective gear, then you stand behind some reeds and wait for the story to present itself. This is not to say you are passive. You choose the place and the day. You pick the gun and the dog. You have the desire to blow the duck apart for reasons that are entirely your own. But you have to be willing to accept not what you wanted to have happen, but what happens. You have to write the story you find in the circumstances you've created, because more often than not the ducks don't show up. The hunters in the next blind begin to argue, and you realize they're in love. You see a snake swimming in your direction. Your dog begins to shiver and whine, and you start to think about this gun that belonged to your father. By the time you get out of the marsh, you will have written a novel so devoid of ducks it will shock you.

ANN PATCHETT

What Now?

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This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

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Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse

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First, think in as homely a way as you can; next, shove your pen under the thought, and lift it by polysyllables to the true level of fiction.

CHARLES READE

Peg Woffington

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Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit -- in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.

CHINUA ACHEBE

Anthills of the Savannah


If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?

CHINUA ACHEBE

Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays


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