WRITING QUOTES XXII

quotations about writing

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


When I was teaching -- I taught for a while -- my students would write as if they were raised by wolves. Or raised on the streets. They were middle-class kids and they were ashamed of their background. They felt like unless they grew up in poverty, they had nothing to write about. Which was interesting because I had always thought that poor people were the ones who were ashamed. But it's not. It's middle-class people who are ashamed of their lives. And it doesn't really matter what your life was like, you can write about anything. It's just the writing of it that is the challenge. I felt sorry for these kids, that they thought that their whole past was absolutely worthless because it was less than remarkable.

DAVID SEDARIS

January Magazine, June 2000

Tags: David Sedaris


The same common-sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères

Tags: Jean de La Bruyère


Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

Mystery and Manners


It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word.

WILLIAM H. GASS

On Being Blue


As far back as I can remember, I've been writing. I've always had this wild imagination, and I love to embellish stories to make them more interesting. When I was a kid I had all these intricate histories for all my stuffed animals and dollhouse families, which I would type out on this old manual typewriter my parents set up for me in the corner of our TV room. I kept writing all through middle school, and in high school I got diverted a bit, but I picked it up again in college. I really didn't think I'd actually be a writer until I graduated and found that I just couldn't stop and go get a real job. Every time I finished something, another idea would follow right behind. So I went into waitressing and just wrote like crazy. At times it seemed really stupid, since I was totally broke and there was no kind of guarantee that I'd ever see anything come of it. Luckily, it did. But even if I hadn't sold a book by now I'd still be writing. It becomes a part of you, just something you do.

SARAH DESSEN

interview, Puffin Books

Tags: Sarah Dessen


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

Tags: Markus Zusak


I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES

The Paris Review, winter 2011


I couldn't imagine, and I don't say this with any pride, but I really couldn't imagine writing without a desperate deadline.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

The Paris Review, fall 2000


It is usual that the moment you write for publication--I mean one of course--one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness.

JOHN STEINBECK

The Paris Review, fall 1975


I never quite know when I'm not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, "Dammit, Thurber, stop writing." She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, "Is he sick?" "No," my wife says, "he's writing something." I have to do it that way on account of my eyes. I still write occasionally--in the proper sense of the word--using black crayon on yellow paper and getting perhaps twenty words to the page. My usual method, though, is to spend the mornings turning over the text in my mind. Then in the afternoon, between two and five, I call in a secretary and dictate to her. I can do about two thousand words. It took me about ten years to learn.

JAMES THURBER

The Paris Review, fall 1955


The truth I'm trying to convey is not a startling one, it is simply a peeling away of affectation. I use whatever gift I have to get behind the façade.

ANITA BROOKNER

The Paris Review, fall 1987


Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past--it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases.

JOHN ASHBERY

interview, The Paris Review, winter 1983

Tags: John Ashbery


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

Tags: Walter Mosley


Nothing can destroy the good writer. The only thing that can alter the good writer is death. Good ones don't have time to bother with success or getting rich.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Paris Review, spring 1956

Tags: William Faulkner


Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

"Notebook D", Aphorisms

Tags: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg


I like to have a hero a little underpowered. I mean, Spiderman is far cooler than Superman. How do you challenge Superman?

PATRICIA BRIGGS

interview, Bitten by Books, March 30, 2010

Tags: Patricia Briggs


You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

Tags: Julian Barnes


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

"A Vampire is a Flexible Metaphor: An Interview with Kelly Link", Gigantic Magazine, October 23, 2013

Tags: Kelly Link


That writer who aspires to immortality, should imitate the sculptor, if he would make the labours of the pen as durable as those of the chisel. Like the sculptor, he should arrive at ultimate perfection, not by what he adds, but by what he takes away.

CHARLES CALEB COLTON

Lacon