quotations about writing
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it."
EDWARD ALBEE
interview with Digby Diehl, 1963
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
Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
JOHN DRYDEN
Essay on Satire
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
It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Nobel Prize speech, December 10, 1954
In creating the strange milieu in which your story takes place, you must first understand as well as you possibly can the familiar milieu in which your own life is taking place. Until you have examined and comprehended the world around you, you can't possibly create a complex and believable imaginary world.
ORSON SCOTT CARD
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
New York Times, April 19, 1992
I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing -- I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project -- it's an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Conversations with Zizek
I don't know where the characters are going to go or what's going to happen. I know that something inevitable will happen. I know that they want certain things and they're in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that. More often than not, an entropy creeps in that strangles me, and then the inevitable happens. I don't know if I have the ability to write an ending like My Fair Lady's, when everyone gets what they want after a few minor conflicts. If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I'd have someone enter with a machine gun.
ADAM RAPP
interview, Bomb Magazine, spring 2006
Crossing out is an art that is, perhaps, even more difficult than writing. It requires the sharpest eye to decide what is superfluous and must be removed. And it requires ruthlessness toward yourself -- the greatest ruthlessness and self-sacrifice. You must know how to sacrifice parts in the name of the whole.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Theme and Plot
As we understand it, the surest way to make a living by the pen is to raise pigs.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
undated letter to his daughter "Scottie"
Writing is eternal,
For therein the dead heart liveth, the clay-cold tongue is eloquent,
And the quick eye of the reader is cleared by the reed of the scribe.
As a fossil in the rock, or a coin in the mortar of a ruin,
So the symbolled thoughts tell of a departed soul:
The plastic hand hath its witness in a statue, and exactitude of vision in a picture,
And so, the mind, that was among us, in its writings is embalmed.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
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
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
attributed, Literary Agents: How to Get & Work with the Right One for You
So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
So much of a novelist's writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on the paper. We remember details of our story, we do not invent them.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
No reason at all why one should go on writing just for the sake of it. I think it is very important to stop when you haven't got anything to say.
JULIAN BARNES
The Paris Review, winter 2000