quotations about writing
If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
STEPHEN KING
On Writing
A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
attributed, Writers on Writing
If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
"The Teacher", Winesburg, Ohio
I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.
SHANNON HALE
attributed, The Novel-Writing Plan
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
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 want to be the apostle of self destruction. I want my book to affect man's reason, his emotions, his nerves, his whole animal nature. I should like my book to make people turn pale with horror as they read it, to affect them like a drug, like a terrifying dream, to drive them mad, to make them curse and hate me but still to read me.
LEONID ANDREYEV
diary, August 1, 1891
The same common-sense which makes an author write good things, makes him dread they are not good enough to deserve reading.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
He was one of those poets who escaped the terrors of writing by writing all the time.
JAMES BALDWIN
Another Country
It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.
ELIZABETH STROUT
Newsweek, July 13, 2009
Even though language has its richness the relationship between language and the writer is always like a stone and you have to make the stone human.
CARMEN BOULLOSA
Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1995
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Angel's Game
When I sit down to write, I have a lot to write, but beforehand, I don't. I'm not full of ideas. Writing is the way I think.
ADAM PHILLIPS
Bomb Magazine, fall 2010
If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
A Story Teller's Story
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
"Furor Scribendi", Bloodchild and Other Stories
Keep your head down, avoid all the distractions of being a writer today--all the shifts in the business, all the drama, all the debating about where publishing is going--and write the best story that you can. It sounds a bit glib, but I think this is advice a lot of people are having trouble following right now. It is so hard to focus. But that is the single key to success.
JEFF ABBOTT
The Big Thrill, June 30, 2013
When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
The Atlantic Online, September 18, 1997
As the deadline looms, my quality of writing is in danger of declining all because I just had to check my email.
GERI SPIELER
"The Dangers of Distracted Writing", Huffington Post, February 28, 2016
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Paris Review, spring 1958
Most writers -- poets in especial -- prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy -- an ecstatic intuition -- and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought -- at the true purposes seized only at the last moment -- at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view -- at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable -- at the cautious selections and rejections -- at the painful erasures and interpolations -- in a word, at the wheels and pinions -- the tackle for scene-shifting -- the step-ladders and demon-traps -- the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"The Philosophy of Composition"