WRITING QUOTES XVIII

quotations about writing

I believe so. In its beginning, dialogue's the easiest thing in the world to write when you have a good ear, which I think I have. But as it goes on, it's the most difficult, because it has so many ways to function. Sometimes I needed to make a speech do three or four or five things at once--reveal what the character said but also what he thought he said, what he hid, what others were going to think he meant, and what they misunderstood, and so forth--all in his single speech. And the speech would have to keep the essence of this one character, his whole particular outlook in concentrated form. This isn't to say I succeeded. But I guess it explains why dialogue gives me my greatest pleasure in writing.

EUDORA WELTY

The Paris Review, fall 1972


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

Tags: Heinrich Böll


All Writing Is Garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. The whole literary scene is a pigpen, especially today.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

Selected Writings

Tags: Antonin Artaud


A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

GRAHAM GREENE

The End of the Affair

Tags: Graham Greene


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

Tags: Alan Lightman


I don't begin a novel with a shopping list--the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It's like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn't a violin. That's what I do when I'm writing a novel, except somehow I'm simultaneously generating the wood as I'm carving it.

WILLIAM GIBSON

The Paris Review, summer 2011


It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

LOUISE ERDRICH

The Paris Review, winter 2010


I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had--I don't know what--the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way perhaps. That's what I think writers are for. This is what our function is.

DORIS LESSING

The Paris Review, spring 1988


To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.

KINGSLEY AMIS

The Amis Collection: Selected Non-fiction

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When I write, I go to live inside the book. By which I mean, mentally I can experience everything I'm writing about. I can see it, hear its sounds, feel its heat or rain. The characters become better known to me than the closest family or friends. This makes the writing-down part very simple most of the time. I only need to describe what's already there in front of me. That said, it won't be a surprise if I add that the imagined worlds quickly become entangled with the so-called reality of this one. Since I write almost every day, and I think (and dream) constantly about my work, it occurs to me I must spend more time in all these places than here.

TANITH LEE

author's note, Wolf Tower


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"

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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

Tags: Luigi Pirandello


Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying--only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The Last Tycoon

Tags: F. Scott Fitzgerald


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"

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Writing is like hunting. There are brutally cold afternoons with nothing in sight, only the wind and your breaking heart. Then the moment when you bag something big.... This is a trophy brought back from the further realm, the kingdom of perpetual glistening night where we know ourselves absolutely. This one goes on the wall.

KATE BRAVERMAN

attributed, From Book to Bestseller


I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you -- it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.

PHILIP ROTH

Deception: A Novel


I have friends, some of whom are spectacularly good writers, who really want someone to edit them. I don't register that impulse. It's like the impulse for wanting a dog.

FRAN LEBOWITZ

interview, A. V. Club, June 17, 2011

Tags: Fran Lebowitz


The life of a writer is absolute hell ... if he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

ROALD DAHL

Boy

Tags: Roald Dahl


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


Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.

MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook

Tags: Mignon McLaughlin