WRITING QUOTES VIII

quotations about writing

The excitement I get from writing is finding out each day what happens next.

CHARLES DE LINT

"One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Charles de Lint", The Yalsa Hub, September 19, 2013

Tags: Charles de Lint


Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.

CONRAD AIKEN

interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968

Tags: Conrad Aiken


I tend to write things seven times before I show them to my editor. I write them seven times, then I take them on tour, read them like a dozen times on tour, then go back to the room and rewrite, read and rewrite, and I try to learn as much as I can on my own before I show it to my editor at The New Yorker. I would never show him a first draft, because then he's really going to be sick of it by the twelfth draft.

DAVID SEDARIS

Oasis Magazine, June 2008


Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

EMIL CIORAN

The Trouble with Being Born

Tags: Emil Cioran


There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

EMILE ZOLA

letter to Cezanne

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When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

ISAAC ASIMOV

I, Asimov: A Memoir

Tags: Isaac Asimov


Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.

JACK LONDON

Martin Eden

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Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

JOHN DOS PASSOS

The Paris Review, spring 1969


You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer--history shows it's better if you're not--but you have to understand your badness.

PETER ABRAHAMS

End of Story

Tags: Peter Abrahams


Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -- you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place. Trust your demon.

ROGER ZELAZNY

introduction, "Passion Play"

Tags: Roger Zelazny


The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

THOMAS MANN

Death in Venice

Tags: Thomas Mann


To me, writing is not a profession. You might as well call living a profession. Or having children. Anything you can't help doing.

VICKI BAUM

I Know What I'm Worth

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Transitions are usually not that interesting. I use space breaks instead, and a lot of them. A space break makes a clean segue whereas some segues you try to write sound convenient, contrived. The white space sets off, underscores, the writing presented, and you have to be sure it deserves to be highlighted this way. If used honestly and not as a gimmick, these spaces can signify the way the mind really works, noting moments and assembling them in such a way that a kind of logic or pattern comes forward, until the accretion of moments forms a whole experience, observation, state of being. The connective tissue of a story is often the white space, which is not empty.

AMY HEMPEL

The Paris Review, summer 2003

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Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.

CHINUA ACHEBE

There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra


When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

The Paris Review, spring 1958


The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.

GEORGE HENRY LEWES

The Principles of Success in Literature

Tags: George Henry Lewes


Fiction is based on reality unless you're a fairy-tale artist, you have to get your knowledge of life from somewhere. You have to know the material you're writing about before you alter it.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON

interview, Associated Press, 2003


Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères

Tags: Jean de La Bruyère


Novelists have, on the average, about the same IQs as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale's department store. Our power is patience. We have discovered that writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent, if only that person will write the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

KURT VONNEGUT

attributed, Quit Your Day Job!

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So it is with all great writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of -- as opposed to thinking about themselves -- and to which they have not yet given expression.

MARCEL PROUST

Within a Budding Grove

Tags: Marcel Proust