WRITING QUOTES IV
quotations about writing
A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Old School
Writing is a profession you can practice while upside down and experiencing total blackout in a cave. You just use the mental recorder instead of pen and paper ... or portable ... and hope you find a use for the experience.
C. J. CHERRYH
interview, SFF World, January 1, 2000
Completing a book, it's a little like having a baby.... There's a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
interview, The Telegraph, August 31, 2010
There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.
HURAKI MURAKAMI
Hear the Wind Sing
Rejections are painful, but inevitable. They're every writer's rite of passage.
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
"Furor Scribendi", Bloodchild and Other Stories
It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
I am not someone who is very good at writing a certain amounts every day. I know that's what one is told one should do, but what I tend to do is kind of sequester myself away while I am in London for a few weeks at a time and become very antisocial and write very, very intensively over a relatively short time. I am much more of a burst writer than a steady-state writer.
CHINA MIÉVILLE
"In a Carapace of Light: A Conversation with China Miéville", Clarkesworld
I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.
JANE AUSTEN
letter to Cassandra Austen, October 26, 1813
To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.
GAO XINGJIAN
Nobel Lecture, 2000
There would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.
MARKUS ZUSAK
The Book Thief
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
attributed, Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer's Life
If I've already figured out how the book ends, why bother to finish writing it? My writing isn't terribly efficient, because I often have to backtrack a bit when I change my mind, but I like the sense of discovery that comes from not knowing what happens next.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
interview, Bitten by Books, March 30, 2010
I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"Q & A: Author Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Time, June 30, 2009
I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.
ANN BEATTIE
Conversations with Ann Beattie
Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its power.
JOAN DIDION
Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations
For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint concept, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Confessions
A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere -- even in prison.
LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
The Atlantic, October 15, 1997
When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don't choose what kind of story it is or what's going to happen. I just wait.
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Paris Review, summer 2004