WRITING QUOTES XIV

quotations about writing

We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.

GARRISON KEILLOR

"Who Has Time to Be a Writer?", Salon, August 11, 1998

Tags: Garrison Keillor


Yet do not miss the moral, my good men.
For Saint Paul says that all that's written well
Is written down some useful truth to tell.
Then take the wheat and let the chaff lie still.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

The Canterbury Tales

Tags: Geoffrey Chaucer


Usually, you don't know where a book comes from ... it's just there, some kind of an itch that you can't quite scratch.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

interview with Oprah Winfrey, June 1, 2008

Tags: Cormac McCarthy


Write only of what is important and eternal.

ANTON CHEKHOV

The Seagull


Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

EDWARD ALBEE

Saturday Review, May 4, 1966


The industry is a terrible, cold place run by people who love to tear writers apart. Rejection is the norm, which means writing is the act of falling madly, deeply in love with your characters and story, even knowing you'll probably get your heart broken for it.

COREY MANDELL

"Beware the Writing Zombies", Huffington Post, February 25, 2016


Writing groups are the best things to happen to a writer since the invention of spell check. (I rely heavily on both so I would know.)

DASHA FAYVINOVA

"9 Reasons Joining A Writing Group Is One Of The Best Ways A Writer Can Grow", Bustle, February 8, 2016


For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach up and pick it.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination

Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

TANITH LEE

The Book of the Damned

Tags: Tanith Lee


There is probably no hell for authors in the next world--they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.

CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE

Intuitions and Summaries of Thought


Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?

EUDORA WELTY

On Writing


When I write, I write because a thing has to be done. I don't think a writer should meddle too much with his own work. He should let the work write itself.

JORGE LUIS BORGES

The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967


Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

KURT VONNEGUT

A Man Without a Country


I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously--that I'm seeing it in one flash. But in the working-out, the writing-out, infinite surprises happen. Thank God, because the surprise, the twist, the phrase that comes at the right moment out of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, that joyful little push that keeps a writer going.

TRUMAN CAPOTE

The Paris Review, spring-summer 1957


In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

preface, The First Forty-Nine Stories


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

Tags: Martin Amis


It's not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us--a book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth between times--as different from each other as those other creatures--jellyfish, aren't they, of a kind?--where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness.

EDITH WHARTON

"The Legend", Tales of Men and Ghosts

Tags: Edith Wharton


If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.

JOHN DOS PASSOS

New York Times, October 25, 1959

Tags: John Dos Passos


The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

JOHN STEINBECK

New York Times, June 2, 1969

Tags: John Steinbeck


To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

MARK TWAIN

"How to Tell a Story"

Tags: Mark Twain