About Writing Quotes
Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.
She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins.
As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end.
Don't try to write anything you can't feel - it will be a failure - 'echoes nothing worth
Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
Hell man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.
When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.
History never repeats itself, historians do.
You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --
...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.
After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock.
Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public.
Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.
Beginnings are so important. Just finding that right moment to introduce this character, this world, it’s everything.
Whenever there's something wrong with your writing, suspect that there's something wrong with your thinking.
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.
It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?
If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.
For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?
Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in.
Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.
this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
Just because we're fictional characters doesn't mean you can pick us up and move us anywhere you want.--the people of Lake Woebegon
I decided that if I was never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I want to do 'cause then at least I would've done what I wanted to do in life. What's that worth?
No one can call themselves a writer until he or she has written at least fifty stories.
If only these walls could talk…the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.
For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.
If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.
The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.
I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.
Many women arrange their lives around the people they love. Unfortunately, that arrangement takes up most of our days.
And I think that in myself (and perhaps evident in what I write) fear of loss and the corresponding instinct to protect myself against loss are potent forces.
My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.
I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.
But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.
To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.
