quotations about writing
The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.
CHARLES DE LINT
"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013
Transitions are usually not that interesting. I use space breaks instead, and a lot of them. A space break makes a clean segue whereas some segues you try to write sound convenient, contrived. The white space sets off, underscores, the writing presented, and you have to be sure it deserves to be highlighted this way. If used honestly and not as a gimmick, these spaces can signify the way the mind really works, noting moments and assembling them in such a way that a kind of logic or pattern comes forward, until the accretion of moments forms a whole experience, observation, state of being. The connective tissue of a story is often the white space, which is not empty.
AMY HEMPEL
The Paris Review, summer 2003
My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.
GRAHAM GREENE
International Herald Tribune, October 7, 1977
The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.
GEORGE HENRY LEWES
The Principles of Success in Literature
No music. No rituals. At home I write in my office or on the laptop in the kitchen where our puppy likes to sleep, and I love his company. But I've trained myself to be able to work anywhere, and I write on trains, planes, in automobiles (if I'm not the driver), airports, hotel rooms. I travel often. If I couldn't write wherever I was I would get little done. I also can write in short bursts. Fifteen minutes are enough to move a story forward.
GAIL CARSON LEVINE
interview, Bookshop Talk, September 22, 2011
WHEN YOU LEAVE YOUR TYPEWRITER YOU LEAVE YOUR MACHINE GUN AND THE RATS COME POURING THROUGH.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Many writers are there that paint a stolen jade and sell it for a colt at the nearest fair.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from books, since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at things for himself.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
So it is with all great writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of -- as opposed to thinking about themselves -- and to which they have not yet given expression.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
JOHN STEINBECK
Quote Magazine, June 18, 1961
There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
New York Times, November 23, 1941
The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
"The Business of a Novelist"
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
JOAN DIDION
The Paris Review, spring 2006
I do everything they tell you not to. I go back and fix things as I go, otherwise I can't move forward. I don't write every day, I write in binges. I don't write drafts, what I write, fixed as I go, is pretty much what gets published. Everybody writes differently, and there are a lot of people who want everybody to write in the same way, people who have a lot invested in telling people to write a whole crappy first draft and then revise it, and so on. That absolutely doesn't work for me. I tell people there are things they can try, and things that might help, but there aren't any rules, except to do what works for you, what gets the story on the page.
JO WALTON
interview, RT Book Reviews
Read heavily in the area where you want to write. Be aware of what's selling and what's doing well but don't try to write to market trends; they are fleeting.
JEFF ABBOTT
interview, Book Browse
Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
interview, Associated Press, 2003
I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.
HANNAH ARENDT
interview, ZDF TV, Zur Person, October 28, 1964
Young writers if they are to mature require a period of between three and seven years in which to live down their promise. Promise is like the mediaeval hangman who after settling the noose, pushed his victim off the platform and jumped on his back, his weight acting a drop while his jockeying arms prevented the unfortunate from loosening the rope. When he judged him dead he dropped to the ground.
CYRIL CONNOLLY
Enemies of Promise
I've come to believe that a huge part of getting better at writing is forcing yourself to see the things that have been in the corner of your eye all along. That means writing stories that include characters from other cultures and backgrounds--but also, being more open to other viewpoints in general. It also means interrogating all of your other lazy ideas and drilling into all of the "of courses" that you let yourself get away with.
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS
"The Single Most Important Thing You Can Do To Make Your Writing More Awesome", Gizmodo, February 25, 2016
Fine writing is generally the effect of spontaneous thoughts and a labored style.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners