Writing Quotes

I have a huge and savage conscience that won't let me get away with things.

The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

If it pleases you and you can write at all, it's gonna please somebody else.

The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.

Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

I was certain t find the familiar sting of salt, but what I needed to know was what kind: kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start.

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

When I'm writing, I'm waiting to see somebody, and I'm waiting to hear them. It's almost like conjuring spirits out of the air, using your own imaginative instability.

The obscurity of a writer is generally in proportion to his incapacity.

...writing is not a performance but a generosity.

A novelist is a person who lives in other people's skins.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

In general, shorter is better. If you can encapsulate your idea into a single captivating sentence, you're halfway home.

Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.

A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing.

(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspired. It's mainly a matter of forcing yourself to write.

I decided that adventure was the best way to learn about writing.

A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.

The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.

Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent, guilt-ridden one--or both. Usually both.

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.

She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up.

Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.

You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.

With writing, we have second chances.

A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.

All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.

A book is a suicide postponed.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.