WRITING QUOTES III
quotations about writing
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No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
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My Day
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I seldom have a firm plot or any idea at all about the ending. But there is a clear, almost mathematically conceptual idea that determines length--the length or brevity of a literary work being comparable to the size of the frame needed by a picture.
HEINRICH BÖLL
The Paris Review, spring 1983
There was a kind of poetry I was seeking in my prose, word to be laid against word in just a certain way, a kind of word color, a march of words and sentences, the color to be squeezed out of simple words, simple sentence construction.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
Memoirs
Here's a news flash--writers are selfish people. Truth is, creative types like me are driven by one impulse--to make up a world in which we get to control everything and everyone. We decide who enters and who exits, what the weather will be, who will hook up with whom, who will win and who will lose. It makes us feel powerful and, in all honesty, has relatively little to do with thinking about what will make anyone else happy.
VICTORIA LAURIE
acknowledgements, What's A Ghoul to Do?
Whoop! 6K words, 21 pages, and 8 miles on the treadmill -- DONE! #ProductiveDay #LetThereBeIceCream
VICTORIA LAURIE
Twitter post, December 21, 2014
Writing is a profession you can practice while upside down and experiencing total blackout in a cave. You just use the mental recorder instead of pen and paper ... or portable ... and hope you find a use for the experience.
C. J. CHERRYH
interview, SFF World, January 1, 2000
A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
"Adam's Curse", In the Seven Woods
The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
attributed, Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer's Life
A little while back I observed that many people are put off writing because they fear committing one or more of the innumerable errors that seem to lie in wait for them at every step of composition. But if one understands that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships and that the number of relationships involved is finite, one understands too that there is only one error to worry about, the error of being illogical, and only one rule to follow: make sure that every component of your sentence is related to the other components in a way that is clear and unambiguous (unless ambiguity is what you are aiming at).
STANLEY FISH
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
A writer's greatest pleasure is revealing to people things they knew but did not know they knew. Or did not realize everyone else knew, too. This produces a warm sense of fellow feeling and is the best a writer can do.
ANDY ROONEY
"A Few Words from Andy Rooney: A Face of America Commentary"
I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality.
ANN BEATTIE
Conversations with Ann Beattie
The interesting thing is that I rarely look at the outline once I've done it. And when I read the outline once I've written the novel, I realize I've written a totally different book.
JONATHAN KELLERMAN
"Novelist explains how psychology training honed his writing", USC News, February 25, 2016
It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"Carlos Ruiz Zafon's love letter to literature", New Zealand Listener, March 14, 2013
The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.
UMBERTO ECO
postscript, The Name of the Rose
Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.
HENRIK IBSEN
letter to Munich editor Georg Conrad
I was always a believer, even with word processing, that there's something useful about having to retrace your steps from the beginning. And you have to print it out, too--you only get so far if you work by staring at a screen, because the resolution of the paper page is much higher. Your eye actually takes in things on paper more efficiently. I can fiddle around with something on a screen for days and think I'm getting somewhere, and it won't be right. Then I'll print it out and take it to bed, and instantly it's obvious what's bad about it, and I'll cross out, cross out, cross out.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Paris Review, fall 2011
In writing, it would help a lot if we had some intermediate punctuation marks to indicate soft questions, soft exclamations, and different inflection in dialogue. But we just don't. And question marks and exclamation marks can jar a reader unnecessarily.
ANNE RICE
interview, The Huffington Post, October 15, 2013
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence. It's just so easy to give up!
OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
Locus Magazine, June 2000
To this day, if you ask me how I became a writer, I cannot give you an answer. To this day, if you ask me how a book is written, I cannot answer. For long periods, if I didn't know that somehow in the past I had written a book, I would have given up.
V. S. NAIPAUL
New York Times, April 24, 1994
Fiction shows us the past as well as the present moment in mortal light; it is an art served by the indelibility of our memory, and one empowered by a sharp and prophetic awareness of what is ephemeral. It is by the ephemeral that our feeling is so strongly aroused for what endures, or strives to endure.
EUDORA WELTY
On Writing