WRITING QUOTES XXIX

quotations about writing

Writing is a conversation, to me. The best kind. You can't get interrupted.

GERALD ASHER

speech at the Symposium for Professional Wine Writers, February 2011

Tags: Gerald Asher


I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

The Paris Review, summer 1993

Tags: Fran Lebowitz


A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Paris Review, spring 1958


I think any start has to be a false start because really there's no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know it's really a false start is when you start ... it's hard to put into words.

ELIF BATUMAN

The Paris Review, winter 2012


Writing can't be a way of life -- the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

DORIS LESSING

Doris Lessing: Conversations

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In writing, as in speaking, less is more. When you are editing -- which should be immediately after you finish the writing for one session and again at least a day or more after you finished it -- look over the piece with a critical eye and cut, cut, cut.

ALI MADEEH HASHMI

"The art of writing", The News on Sunday, March 11, 2017


Getting out of bed of a morning has never been a problem, but I've noticed of late that my writing is better in the afternoon. The mornings are methodical, when all the blockwork and first-fix stuff takes place. The ornamentation or even de-ornamentation -- the things that separate writing from writing -- don't seem possible until later in the day, when I've established some perspective.

SIMON ARMITAGE

"Language is my enemy -- I spend my life battling with it", The Guardian, March 25, 2017


Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.

SAUL BELLOW

Nobel lecture, December 12, 1976

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I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.

SAM SHEPARD

The Paris Review

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Theatre and publishing worship either precocious young writers or mute dead ones.

ROSEMARY JENKINSON

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


I would quit while you're ahead. Really, it's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you.

PHILIP ROTH

advice to a young writer, "Writer meets Roth", New York writer Julian Tepper's blog


Beginning a book is unpleasant. I'm entirely uncertain about the character and the predicament, and a character in his predicament is what I have to begin with. Worse than not knowing your subject is not knowing how to treat it, because that's finally everything. I type out beginnings and they're awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I need something driving down the center of a book, a magnet to draw everything to it--that's what I look for during the first months of writing something new. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive. Okay, I say to myself, that's your beginning, start there; that's the first paragraph of the book.

PHILIP ROTH

Paris Review, fall 1984


I think it's bad to talk about one's present work, for it spoils something at the root of the creative act. It discharges the tension.

NORMAN MAILER

attributed, The Writer's Quotation Book


When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

NICHOLSON BAKER

interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013

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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

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I don't think I'm cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.

KELLY LINK

"Words by Flashlight", Sybil's Garage, June 7, 2006

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I believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to.

JEFF ABBOTT

Publisher's Weekly, May 30, 2011


Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Paris Review, spring 1958

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Every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

EDWARD ALBEE

The New York Times, September 18, 1966

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Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.

EDMUND BURKE

Reflections on the Revolution in France

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