quotations about writing
Writing is about growth, challenge and change. Without those things, there's no joy in it.
VERONICA ROTH
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"Best-Selling Author Veronica Roth Tells What Writing Books Is Really Like", Entrepreneur, March 30, 2017
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Estimates of Some Englishmen and Scotchmen
The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from books, since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at things for himself.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
For me, writing is just a thing I need to do everyday, like breathing or eating.
GUY CAPECELATRO III
"Power of music shines in Capecelatro's heartfelt album", Seacoast Online, March 30, 2017
I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.
CORMAC MCCARTHY
The Washington Post, November 13, 2009
Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On Paraguay"
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
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
You grow a whole lot more as a writer by getting old stories out of the house and letting new ones come in and live with you until they grow up and are ready to go. Don't let the old ones stay there and grow fat and cranky and eat all the food out of the refrigerator. You have dozens of generations of stories inside you, but the only way to make room for the new ones is to write the old ones and mail them off.
ORSON SCOTT CARD
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy
Every writer is an iron-monger that melts down old junk into new steel.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
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
This is a slow business to have success in. There are exceptions, but for the most part it's kind of like the last writer standing.... I've got gray. I've got plenty of gray. I'm creating a career slowly, like a coral reef.
ROBERT REED
Lincoln Journal Star, January 11, 2004
I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
National Observer, March 12, 1977
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
Here are the two states in which you may exist: person who writes, or person who does not. If you write: you are a writer. If you do not write: you are not. Aspiring is a meaningless null state that romanticizes Not Writing. It's as ludicrous as saying, "I aspire to pick up that piece of paper that fell on the floor." Either pick it up or don't. I don’t want to hear about how your diaper's full. Take it off or stop talking about it.
CHUCK WENDIG
The Kick-Ass Writer
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
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