WRITING QUOTES XX

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


There is a realm of possible knowledge which can be reached by artists, which is not susceptible of mathematical verification but which is true. This is sometimes spoken as the ineffable. If there is any word I detest in the language, this would be it, but the fact that it exists, the word ineffable, is suspicious in that it suggests that there might be something that is ineffable. And I believe that that's the place artists are trying to get to, and I further believe that when they are successful, they reach it.

DONALD BARTHELME

"A Symposium of Fiction"


I write from a thorough conviction that it is the duty of me, and with the belief that, after every drawback and shortcoming, I do my best, all things considered--that is for me, and, so being, the not being listened to by one human creature would, I hope, in nowise affect me.

ROBERT BROWNING

letter to Elizabeth Barrett, February 11, 1845

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Writing is a kind of centering, a kind of meditation. I find it to be profoundly rewarding. Actually, I'm an addict. If I go too long, and so far that hasn't been longer than a week, I start to feel unsettled, nervous. I begin to feel that I'm not engaged, a disconnection is threatening my world, that I'm being passed by and I'm both failing myself and the world by not writing about it.

WALTER BARGEN

"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"

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The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continually set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It's not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating, discovering. The journey is your narrative.

WALTER MOSLEY

This Year You Write Your Novel

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If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

RAY BRADBURY

attributed, The Writer's Workout

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After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

JEAN COCTEAU

The Paris Review, summer-fall, 1964


I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.

WILLIAM H. GASS

The Paris Review, summer 1977

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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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The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't. It's incredibly annoying for us scribblers.

IAIN M. BANKS

"Iain Banks: The Final Interview", The Guardian, June 14, 2013

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The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.

JOHN LE CARRÉ

attributed, The Creative Compass: Writing Your Way from Inspiration to Publication


Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage--that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

The Art of Being Ruled

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I think that as a writer your responsibility is to search for and stir up the things that are in this world. There is violence in all of us, and beauty, and strength, and weakness. What's my job? To only write about the good and the beauty, or is it to write about all of it? That's my greater responsibility, to write about them as I see them and as they are.

MARKUS ZUSAK

"On Top of His Game: SLJ Interviews Margaret A. Edwards Award Winner Markus Zusak", School Library Journal, June 2, 2014

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After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.

ROGER ZELAZNY

interview, Phlogiston, 1995

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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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If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

New York Times, April 19, 1992

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With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

JAMES THURBER

New York Post, June 30, 1955

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Occasionally, I'll dream I'm in the factory. That will help me write. Not creatively, but more like a prod. I don't want to go back there.

ROBERT REED

Lincoln Journal Star, January 11, 2004


After a few days of writing I am as happy to see people as if I've been marooned on a desert island for a month.

ROSEMARY JENKINSON

"Writing is not about youth but about spark", Irish Times, March 27, 2017


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