WRITING QUOTES XXV

quotations about writing

Why do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don't care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author's cruelty. And the reader's sympathy ... it takes a mean author to write a good story.

GAIL CARSON LEVINE

Writing Magic

Tags: Gail Carson Levine


What I like to do is write the story, see where it takes me -- and then check out the details I don't know. When I first started writing, there were a lot of things about the world that I understood but didn't have the vocabulary for -- and even more things that I just had no idea about. For instance, do you know all the parts of a door frame? Or what flowers bloom in the spring in alpine climates? There's a surprising amount of homework involved in writing a book.

PATRICIA BRIGGS

interview, Bitten by Books, March 30, 2010


The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

THOMAS WOLFE

The Autobiography of an American Novelist


What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.

TOBIAS WOLFF

Fiction Writers Review, April 5, 2009

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To leave the reader free to decide what your work means, that's the real art; it makes the work inexhaustible.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Guardian, December 17, 2005

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Now, writing every day, and being paid for it and encouraged to do it, it was as if, in the midst of the clichéd dark and stormy night, I found the magical inn, its windows golden lit, and Summer was due to start tomorrow. I can only work at one thing well. Deprive me of that, and my "back-up plan," even now, will be the empty, stormy, darkened heath -- where, incidentally, even unpublished, somehow I'll still be writing.

TANITH LEE

interview, Intergalactic Medicine Show

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There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer.

EUDORA WELTY

On Writing

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My plots are always rudimentary. Whatever I've accomplished certainly does not depend on my virtuosity with plot. Generally I don't even have a plot. What happens is that my characters engage in an action, and out of that action little bits of plot sometimes adhere to the narrative. I never have to worry about lifting a plot, because I don't conceive of a book that way.

NORMAN MAILER

The Paris Review, winter-spring 1964


Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.

JEAN COCTEAU

Diary of an Unknown

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What you're trying to do when you write is to crowd the reader out of his own space and occupy it with yours, in a good cause. You're trying to take over his sensibility and deliver an experience that moves from mere information.

ROBERT STONE

The Paris Review, winter 1985

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The less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do.

LAWRENCE BLOCK

Newsweek, July 13, 2009

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The art of the word is painting + architecture + music.

YEVGENY ZAMYATIN

The New Russian Prose

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In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.

THEODOR W. ADORNO

Minima Moralia

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To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm's way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public, or anything sharp that might irritate its skin.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

The Common Reader


Brevity is the sister of talent.

ANTON CHEKHOV

letter to A. P. Chekhov, April 11, 1889

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I tend to be a plotter, just because I do have to write an outline of the book for my publisher, and I like to have an idea of where I'm headed. That said, I don't treat the outline as cast in stone, and I often get better ideas as I write, so the outline is a living thing. What often drives change is when I start writing a particular character and she or he asserts themselves more strongly than I thought they would.

JEFF ABBOTT

"At the Mercy of Storytellers: MysteryPeople Q&A with Jeff Abbott", Mystery People, July 17, 2017

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Writing is a tough thing and you only get better with practice. Just like free throws.

NICK WESTFALL

"Man writes directorial debut movie 'Finding Home'", myfox8, March 30, 2017


I don't particularly care about having [my characters] talk realistically, that doesn't mean very much to me. Actually, a lot of people speak more articulately than some critics think, but before the 20th century it really didn't occur to many writers that their language had to be the language of everyday speech. When Wordsworth first considered that in poetry, it was considered very much of a shocker. And although I'm delighted to have things in ordinary speech, it's not what I'm trying to perform myself at all: I want my characters to get their ideas across, and I want them to be articulate.

LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

interview, Bomb Magazine, fall 1997

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I believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to.

JEFF ABBOTT

Publisher's Weekly, May 30, 2011


Writing a killer first line to a novel is an art form in which there are a few masters and a great many apprentices.

CHUCK WENDIG

"25 Things to Know about Writing the First Chapter of Your Novel", Terrible Minds