Writing Quotes

When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.

You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all.

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be.

At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write.

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it's really a stupid thing to want to do.

I write out of revenge.

You don’t make art out of good intentions.

‎A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes.

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

Every day I ran to that book like it was a bottle of whiskey and crawled inside because it was a world that I had at least some control over, and slowly, in time, it began to take shape.

When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.

A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.

Writer speaks a stench.

I scan the room. Catherine is writing quickly, her light brown hair falling over her face. She is left-handed, and because she writes in pencil her left arm is silver from wrist to elbow.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.

Writing is not lying, nor is it theft. It is a journey and search for transparency between one’s words and one’s soul.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

And every good artist knows that the gift comes from somewhere else, and it's there for a reason, and that's to make the world a better place.

No, she wasn't losing language. She was choking on it.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.

Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.

I got this story from someone who had no business in the telling of it.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

You like to write. It's the single most important quality for someone who wants to be a writer. But not in itself enough.

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoopy?

Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.

If you treat your characters like people, they'll reward you by being fully developed individuals.

Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.

Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.

Nothing so sharpens the thought process as writing down one's arguments. Weaknesses overlooked in oral discussion become painfully obvious on the written page.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.