quotations about writing
There are only two kinds of books which you can write and be pretty sure you're going to make a living -- cook books and detective stories.
REX STOUT
Royal Decree: Conversations with Rex Stout
Irish English is a very different beast from English English or American English. Very different. The way in which Irish writers are only too happy to infuse their language with ambiguity is very different. An English writer will try to be clear. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass. The Irish writer would say: 'No no, it's a lens, it distorts everything.'
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
You are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Motion of Light in Water
When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
REBECCA WEST
The Paris Review, spring 1981
When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.
MAYA ANGELOU
The Paris Review, fall 1990
There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.
EMILE ZOLA
letter to Cezanne
Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On Paraguay"
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.
KATY LEDERER
interview, Identity Theory, February 12, 2005
I never had a plan, except to write. I love what I do, and have from the beginning. Loving what you do makes it a lot easier to work, every day, to face the tough spots and heel in for the long haul. Nothing against plans; they work for some people. But for me, if I'd been planning, worrying about numbers, trying to micro-manage my career, I wouldn't have focused on the writing. If you don't write, you're not read. If you're not read, you don't sell. So that's my Master Plan, I guess. Write the books, let the agent agent, the editor edit, the publisher publish.
NORA ROBERTS
interview, inReads, October 5, 2011
Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living--something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and charm.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.
KURT VONNEGUT
attributed, Quit Your Day Job!
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
KURT VONNEGUT
attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations
Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"Sweater"
Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
Here are the two states in which you may exist: person who writes, or person who does not. If you write: you are a writer. If you do not write: you are not. Aspiring is a meaningless null state that romanticizes Not Writing. It's as ludicrous as saying, "I aspire to pick up that piece of paper that fell on the floor." Either pick it up or don't. I don’t want to hear about how your diaper's full. Take it off or stop talking about it.
CHUCK WENDIG
The Kick-Ass Writer
Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
The Paris Review, spring 1969
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