quotations about writing
Writer's block is only a failure of the ego.
NORMAN MAILER
attributed, A Writer's Time
I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.
KIRBY LARSON
interview, Author Turf, March 6, 2014
My father really taught me that you really develop the habit of writing and you sit down at the same time every day, you don't wait for inspiration. You sit down, it helps your subconscious understand that it's time to start writing and to relax down into that well of dream material and memory and imagination. So, I sit down at the exact same time every day. And I let myself write really awful first drafts of things. I take very short assignments; I will capture for myself in a few words what I'm going to be trying to do that morning, or in that hour. Maybe I'm going to write a description of the lake out in Inverness in West Marin, where I live. And so I try to keep things really small and manageable. I have a one-inch picture frame on my desk so I can remember that that's all I'm going to be able to see in the course of an hour or two, and then I just let myself start and it goes really badly most mornings; as it does for most writers.
ANNE LAMOTT
interview, Big Think, April 6, 2010
Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse
You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
When we attempt to articulate our tender feelings in writing, we enter an inner dialogue of self-exploration: we forage for the more precise word, the more resonant phrasing. If the writing is done with particular care and attention, there is a Goldilocks quality to it: We rustle through an assortment of terms, discarding one, perhaps as "too weak" or another "too ordinary" until we settle upon the one that is "just right". In doing so, we have discovered something about ourselves.
DANIEL GRIFFIN
"Don't Tell Him You Love Him... Put It in Writing", Huffington Post, February 15, 2016
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
When I was teaching -- I taught for a while -- my students would write as if they were raised by wolves. Or raised on the streets. They were middle-class kids and they were ashamed of their background. They felt like unless they grew up in poverty, they had nothing to write about. Which was interesting because I had always thought that poor people were the ones who were ashamed. But it's not. It's middle-class people who are ashamed of their lives. And it doesn't really matter what your life was like, you can write about anything. It's just the writing of it that is the challenge. I felt sorry for these kids, that they thought that their whole past was absolutely worthless because it was less than remarkable.
DAVID SEDARIS
January Magazine, June 2000
You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.
ANNE LAMOTT
"Q&A: Anne Lamott", San Diego Magazine, January 27, 2014
Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat's mat is a story.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, The Creative Compass: Writing Your Way from Inspiration to Publication
I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously--that I'm seeing it in one flash. But in the working-out, the writing-out, infinite surprises happen. Thank God, because the surprise, the twist, the phrase that comes at the right moment out of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, that joyful little push that keeps a writer going.
TRUMAN CAPOTE
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1957
I was aware that you weren't supposed to write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was just as interesting as anywhere else.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
The Paris Review, winter 2011
Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past--it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases.
JOHN ASHBERY
interview, The Paris Review, winter 1983
I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
The Proud Highway
A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, The Twilight and Other Zones
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
undated letter to his daughter "Scottie"
An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
letter to Madame Louise Colet, December 9, 1852
Writing is a kind of centering, a kind of meditation. I find it to be profoundly rewarding. Actually, I'm an addict. If I go too long, and so far that hasn't been longer than a week, I start to feel unsettled, nervous. I begin to feel that I'm not engaged, a disconnection is threatening my world, that I'm being passed by and I'm both failing myself and the world by not writing about it.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri"
Well it's been hard for me to not write, and that's the only process I can speak to I guess, it's so compulsive and I need to do it all the time that sometimes I make myself not do it so I can actually tend to my life. And my life has been in shambles, like my personal relationships, my laundry, paying bills--now I have someone who pays my bills--and it's always been a challenge because it overwhelms me. And just once I start I can go for hours and hours and hours, and sometimes I forget to eat, and the only thing I really break for is to play basketball and to walk around outside and just get some fresh air. A lot of times, days melt away; and when I'm in that zone, I love that it's like going down a rabbit hole that I enjoy.
ADAM RAPP
interview, Broadway Bullet, March 26, 2007