quotations about writing
I have not felt in a humor to entertain you if I had taken up my pen. Perhaps some unbecoming invective might have fallen from it.
ABIGAIL ADAMS
letter to John Adams, May 7, 1776
Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.
ELIF BATUMAN
interview, The Rumpus, April 25, 2012
Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
NORMAN MAILER
The New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1965
We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.
ANNE LAMOTT
Bird by Bird
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
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!
Every writer is an iron-monger that melts down old junk into new steel.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
I like to write. Sometimes I'm afraid that I like it too much because when I get into work I don't want to leave it. As a result I'll go for days and days without leaving the house or wherever I happen to be. I'll go out long enough to get papers and pick up some food and that's it. It's strange, but instead of hating writing I love it too much.
HARPER LEE
interview with Roy Newquist, Counterpoints, 1964
With pen and with pencil we're learning to say
Nothing, more cleverly every day.
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
"Blackberries"
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.
JAMES JOYCE
interview with Max Eastman, Harper's Magazine, 1929?
When I'm writing I find it's the only time that I feel completely self-possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well. It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time.
WILLIAM STYRON
The Paris Review, spring 1954
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
CHARLES SIMIC
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller
Writers in this country, particularly novelists, are likely to come to the medium through some back door. Nearly every writer I know was going to be something else, and then found himself writing by a kind of passionate default.
JOHN BARTH
The Paris Review, spring 1985
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.
GRAHAM GREENE
Ways of Escape
The easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it. (And vice versa: ask the poets at the bus stop.)
MARTIN AMIS
The Information
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
JOHN STEINBECK
Quote Magazine, June 18, 1961
You are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Motion of Light in Water
In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits in the mind like a piece of overheard gossip or a bit of intriguing tattle. The story process is like taking up such a piece of gossip, hunting down the people actually involved, questioning them, finding out what really occurred, and visiting pertinent locations. As with gossip, you can't be too surprised if important things turn up that were left out of the first-heard version entirely; or if points initially made much of turn out to have been distorted, or simply not to have happened at all.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
SAM SHEPARD
The Observer, March 20, 2010