quotations about writing
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
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.
DORIS LESSING
The Paris Review, spring 1988
I don't begin a novel with a shopping list--the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It's like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn't a violin. That's what I do when I'm writing a novel, except somehow I'm simultaneously generating the wood as I'm carving it.
WILLIAM GIBSON
The Paris Review, summer 2011
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
GRAHAM GREENE
New York Times, October 9, 1985
I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Paris Review, summer 1977
Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
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
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
I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort--I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form--all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do.
CONRAD AIKEN
interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968
How hard is the destiny of a maker of books! He has to cut and sew up in order to make ideas follow logically. But when one writes a book on reverie, has the time not come to let the pen run, to let reverie speak, and better yet to dream the reverie at the same time one believes he is transcribing it?
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
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
Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
We need the expressive arts, the ancient scribes, the storytellers, the priests. And that's where I put myself: as a storyteller. Not necessarily a high priestess, but certainly the storyteller. And I would love to be the storyteller of the tribe.
TANITH LEE
"Love & Death & Publishers", Locus Magazine, April 1998
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
To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.
KINGSLEY AMIS
The Amis Collection: Selected Non-fiction
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
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 would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.
MARTIN AMIS
The Paris Review, spring 1998