WRITING QUOTES XV

quotations about writing

It's very unlikely that a writer is going to make a living by writing. So then the question is: how do you balance work, life, and writing? If you find out, please tell me.

KELLY LINK

interview, Apex Magazine, July 2, 2013

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My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.

CHINA MIÉVILLE

The Guardian, September 20, 2012


Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

letter to "Scottie" Fitzgerald, April 27, 1940


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


The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

letter to the editor, Dublin Daily Express, February 27, 1895

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You know nobody's ever going to see the stuff, but you have to write through it. You're just trying to satisfy some grim, barren mandate. There's probably a German word for that.

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

The Paris Review, winter 2012


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

LAWRENCE LESSIG

Wikimania 2006

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Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.

JACK LONDON

"Getting Into Print", Editor magazine, 1903


Good fiction creates its own reality.

NORA ROBERTS

The Stanislaski Brothers


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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I like what I do. Some writers have said in print that they hated writing and it was just a chore and a burden. I certainly don't feel that way about it. Sometimes it's difficult. You know, you always have this image of the perfect thing which you can never achieve, but which you never stop trying to achieve. But I think ... that's your signpost and your guide. You'll never get there, but without it you won't get anywhere.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

interview with Oprah Winfrey, June 1, 2008


I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

WILLIAM H. GASS

The Paris Review, summer 1977

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I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

Middlesex

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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


It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

LOUISE ERDRICH

The Paris Review, winter 2010


Only the hunger for something beyond the personal will allow a writer to break free of one major obstacle to originality -- the fear of self-revelation.

JANE HIRSHFIELD

Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

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Some people talk to themselves, and some people write, and somehow society has decided that one gets committed and one gets a paycheck.

BOB LONSBERRY

official website

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The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques.

GLEN COOK

interview, SF Site, September 2005

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The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

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To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement -- it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writers build their own realities, move into them, and occasionally send letters home.

DAVID GERROLD

The Martian Child

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