WRITING QUOTES III
quotations about writing
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"
No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
My Day
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
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
Whoop! 6K words, 21 pages, and 8 miles on the treadmill -- DONE! #ProductiveDay #LetThereBeIceCream
VICTORIA LAURIE
Twitter post, December 21, 2014
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
Sex has to be good for both partners. That is also the key to writing both fiction and nonfiction. It has to be a good experience for both partners, the writer and the reader, and it is a source of distress to me to observe how frequently writers ignore the pleasure of their partners.
SOL STEIN
Stein on Writing
I can remember discussing the effect of the typewriter on our work with Tom Eliot because he was moving to the typewriter about the same time I was. And I remember our agreeing that it made for a slight change of style in the prose -- that you tended to use more periodic sentences, a little shorter, and a rather choppier style -- and that one must be careful about that. Because, you see, you couldn't look ahead quite far enough, for you were always thinking about putting your fingers on the bloody keys. But that was a passing phase only. We both soon discovered that we were just as free to let the style throw itself into the air as we had been writing manually.
CONRAD AIKEN
interview, The Paris Review, winter-spring 1968
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
Metaphors get under your skin by ghosting right past the logical mind.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
"The Art of Metaphor"
It is the glory and the merit of some men to write well, and of others not to write at all.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
I don't give a damn what other people think. It's entirely their own business. I'm not writing for other people.
HAROLD PINTER
interview, December 1971
I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.
JANE AUSTEN
letter to Cassandra Austen, October 26, 1813
A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.
TOBIAS WOLFF
Old School
A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull
For writing treason and for writing dull.
JOHN DRYDEN
Absalom and Achitophel
Irish English is a very different beast from English English or American English. Very different. The way in which Irish writers are only too happy to infuse their language with ambiguity is very different. An English writer will try to be clear. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass. The Irish writer would say: 'No no, it's a lens, it distorts everything.'
JOHN BANVILLE
"Oblique dreamer", The Guardian, September 17, 2000
Cautious men have many adverbs, "usually," "nearly," "almost ": safe men begin, " it may be advanced " : you never know precisely what their premises are, nor what their conclusion is; they go tremulously like a timid rider; they turn hither and thither; they do not go straight across a subject, like a masterly mind.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
A Moveable Feast
If I've already figured out how the book ends, why bother to finish writing it? My writing isn't terribly efficient, because I often have to backtrack a bit when I change my mind, but I like the sense of discovery that comes from not knowing what happens next.
PATRICIA BRIGGS
interview, Bitten by Books, March 30, 2010
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