quotations about writing
The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques.
GLEN COOK
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interview, SF Site, September 2005
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
ALBERT CAMUS
attributed, 2012: Waking of the Prophets
The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.
CHARLES DE LINT
The Blue Girl
There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word--tension--has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end--is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
"Everything is more complicated than you think", The Economist, November 14, 2011
Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
JAMES THURBER
New York Post, June 30, 1955
Writing is a part of healing, of digging into society.
KHALED KHALIFA
"Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa tells the stories of a bleeding, beautiful country", Syria Direct, March 23, 2017
You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.
KELLY LINK
"A Vampire is a Flexible Metaphor: An Interview with Kelly Link", Gigantic Magazine, October 23, 2013
All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
undated letter to his daughter "Scottie"
Getting even is one great reason for writing.... But getting even isn't necessarily vicious. There are two ways of getting even: one is destructive and the other is restorative. It depends on how the scales are weighted.
WILLIAM H. GASS
The Paris Review, summer 1977
Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse
I consider a story merely as a frame on which to stretch my materials.
WASHINGTON IRVING
introduction, Tales of a Traveler
I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.
J. D. SALINGER
"Seymour: An Introduction"
If I write novels in a country in which most citizens are illiterate, who then is my community?
CHINUA ACHEBE
Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays
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
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
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.
GEORGE ORWELL
Down and Out in Paris and London
To write is to act.
HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE
Letters to Young Men
Well, I don't ever leave out details, in that I don't come up with information or description which I don't then use. I only ever come up with what seems to me absolutely essential to make the story work. I'm not usually an overwriter. As I revise, it's usually a matter of adding in as much vivid details as seem necessary to make the story come clear without slowing down the momentum of the story.
KELLY LINK
interview, Apex Magazine, July 2, 2013
When I am asked how or why I wrote this or that, I always find myself quite embarassed. I would gladly furnish not merely the questioner, but myself as well, with an exhaustive answer, but can never do so. I cannot recreate the context in its entirety, yet I wish that I could, so that at least the literature I myself make might be made slightly less of a mysterious process than bridge-building and bread-baking.
HEINRICH BÖLL
Nobel Lecture, May 2, 1973