WRITING QUOTES XVI

quotations about writing


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Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you.

FLANNERY O'CONNOR
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Mystery and Manners


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Writing is -- at least for me -- movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen -- and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives -- on paper to boot! -- towards incarnation.

HEINRICH BÖLL

Nobel Lecture, May 2, 1973


Popular success is a palace built for a writer by publishers, journalists, admirers and professional reputation makers, in which a silent army of termites, rats, dry rot and death-watch beetles are tunnelling away, till, at the very moment of completion, it is ready to fall down. The one hope for a writer is that although his enemies are often unseen they are seldom unheard. He must listen for the death-watch, listen for the faint toc-toc, the critic's truth sharpened by envy, the embarrassed praise of a sincere friend, the silence of gifted contemporaries, the implications of the don in the manger, the visitor in the small hours. He must dismiss the builders and contractors, elude the fans with an assumed name and dark glasses, force his way off the moving staircase, subject every thing he writes to a supreme critical court. Would it amuse Horace or Milton or Swift or Leopardi? Could it be read to Flaubert? Would it be chosen by the Infallible Worm, by the discriminating palates of the dead?

CYRIL CONNOLLY

Enemies of Promise


Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

CYRIL CONNOLLY

The New Statesman, February 25, 1933


Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

JOHN STEINBECK

Quote Magazine, June 18, 1961

Tags: John Steinbeck


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


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


This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

Tags: Anne Lamott


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


Writing, in war and in peace, is the same thing. The only difference is how you view yourself.... Mass death, revolutions and history make you reconsider things.

KHALED KHALIFA

"Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa tells the stories of a bleeding, beautiful country", Syria Direct, March 23, 2017


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 wrote without much effort; for I was rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing.

JANE AUSTEN

letter to Cassandra Austen, June 20, 1808

Tags: Jane Austen


The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques.

GLEN COOK

interview, SF Site, September 2005

Tags: Glen Cook


The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

ALBERT CAMUS

attributed, 2012: Waking of the Prophets

Tags: Albert Camus


Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

NORMAN MAILER

The New York Times, October 4, 2000


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

Tags: Kelly Link


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

Tags: James Thurber


I'm a pretty autobiographical writer. I like a high ratio of true events to made-up events or rearranged events. I've always felt that if you think you can find a way to tell the truth and keep the fictional flux going, it's at least a good idea to try, because very often the truth is more interesting than the posed picture, the tableau. The messiness of truth is a useful corrective.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Paris Review, fall 2011

Tags: Nicholson Baker


I've increasingly been interested in leaving gaps and unresolved elements within a novel, trying to escape from the model of the novel as something in which there is a secret that, when revealed, will make all clear. It seems to me too unlike life, too convenient, too fictional.

ALAN HOLLINGHURST

The Paris Review, winter 2011