quotations about writing
You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.
KELLY LINK
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"A Vampire is a Flexible Metaphor: An Interview with Kelly Link", Gigantic Magazine, October 23, 2013
Writing is a part of healing, of digging into society.
KHALED KHALIFA
"Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa tells the stories of a bleeding, beautiful country", Syria Direct, March 23, 2017
Writing is -- at least for me -- movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen -- and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives -- on paper to boot! -- towards incarnation.
HEINRICH BÖLL
Nobel Lecture, May 2, 1973
When we attempt to articulate our tender feelings in writing, we enter an inner dialogue of self-exploration: we forage for the more precise word, the more resonant phrasing. If the writing is done with particular care and attention, there is a Goldilocks quality to it: We rustle through an assortment of terms, discarding one, perhaps as "too weak" or another "too ordinary" until we settle upon the one that is "just right". In doing so, we have discovered something about ourselves.
DANIEL GRIFFIN
"Don't Tell Him You Love Him... Put It in Writing", Huffington Post, February 15, 2016
There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
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
The first paragraph. The last paragraph. That's where the story is going and how it's going to end. Or else you'll go off in a hundred different directions.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Paris Review, fall 2000
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
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
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
In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
SAM SHEPARD
The Observer, March 20, 2010
However much the writer might long to be, in his work, simple, honest, and straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Not-Knowing"
For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", The Waste Books
"Writing" is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
Wikimania 2006
Writing, in war and in peace, is the same thing. The only difference is how you view yourself.... Mass death, revolutions and history make you reconsider things.
KHALED KHALIFA
"Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa tells the stories of a bleeding, beautiful country", Syria Direct, March 23, 2017
Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
NORMAN MAILER
The New York Times, October 4, 2000
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
JOHN STEINBECK
Quote Magazine, June 18, 1961