quotations about writing
I compelled myself all through to write an exercise in verse, in a different form, every day of the year. I turned out my page every day, of some sort--I mean I didn't give a damn about the meaning, I just wanted to master the form--all the way from free verse, Walt Whitman, to the most elaborate of villanelles and ballad forms. Very good training. I've always told everybody who has ever come to me that I thought that was the first thing to do.
CONRAD AIKEN
interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968
If people did not want their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
A Story Teller's Story
I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
The Paris Review, summer 1993
Some people talk to themselves, and some people write, and somehow society has decided that one gets committed and one gets a paycheck.
BOB LONSBERRY
official website
In the end, the secret of writing is to be a tortoise, not a hare.
JONATHAN KELLERMAN
"Novelist explains how psychology training honed his writing", USC News, February 25, 2016
In writing, as in speaking, less is more. When you are editing -- which should be immediately after you finish the writing for one session and again at least a day or more after you finished it -- look over the piece with a critical eye and cut, cut, cut.
ALI MADEEH HASHMI
"The art of writing", The News on Sunday, March 11, 2017
So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.
KOBO ABE
The Face of Another
Any writer, in whatever form, must first pass through the stage of being a reader. It is unimaginable that someone could become a writer without first being a reader. Only a daydreamer who had fallen into an unhealthy idealism could exoticize a writer in this way. Such misperception is similar to believing that thought is possible without language.
KOBO ABE
The Frontier Within
There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape.... The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.
NICHOLSON BAKER
interview, Interview Magazine, September 16, 2013
The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.
EUGENE IONESCO
Present Past / Past Present
One forges one's style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.
EMILE ZOLA
Le Figaro
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.
MARK TWAIN
"How to Tell a Story"
The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Writing is eternal,
For therein the dead heart liveth, the clay-cold tongue is eloquent,
And the quick eye of the reader is cleared by the reed of the scribe.
As a fossil in the rock, or a coin in the mortar of a ruin,
So the symbolled thoughts tell of a departed soul:
The plastic hand hath its witness in a statue, and exactitude of vision in a picture,
And so, the mind, that was among us, in its writings is embalmed.
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
Proverbial Philosophy
Journalism is a good place for any writer to start -- the retailing of fact is always a useful trade and can it help you learn to appreciate the declarative sentence. A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"Post to the Host", July 2005
Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Table-Talk
When I hear about some sensational new writer I sort of think, Shut up ... you've got to be around for a long time before you can really say you're a writer. You've got to stand the test of time, which is the only real test there is.
MARTIN AMIS
"The Past Gets Bigger and the Future Shrinks", Los Angeles Review of Books, July 21, 2013
Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
interview, SF Site, April 2001
[Rejection] made me quit writing once. For six months. I started up again when my then seven-year-old son asked me to start writing again because I was too grumpy when I wasn't writing.
KIRBY LARSON
interview, Author Turf, March 6, 2014
I don't like to write from a flat, cold position. You must like what you're doing very much or like the people -- either like them or hate them. You can't be indifferent.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, February 1986