WRITING QUOTES VI

quotations about writing

The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

Tags: Anne Lamott


Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life.

MARTIN AMIS

Essays


All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A Moveable Feast

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When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

KURT VONNEGUT

attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations

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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

Tags: John Banville


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

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I want to be a writer you can always depend on for a good read during your vacation, during your flight, during a time in your life when you want to forget the world around you. The nicest notes I've received from readers are those that tell me I've gotten them back into reading for entertainment. For me, there is no greater compliment.

JEFF ABBOTT

Publisher's Weekly, May 30, 2011


Let us not, then, lament over the decay and oblivion into which ancient writers descend; they do but submit to the great law of nature, which declares that all sublunary shapes of matter shall be limited in their duration, but which decrees, also, that their elements and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity, and the species continue to flourish. Thus, also, do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their fathers, that is to say, with the authors who preceded them--and from whom they had stolen.

WASHINGTON IRVING

"The Art of Book-Making", The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon


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


One of the things that writers very quickly learn to avoid is talking their work away. Talking about your work hardens it prematurely, and weakens the charge. You need to keep a fluid sense of the work in hand--it has to be able to change almost without your being aware that it's changing.

TOBIAS WOLFF

The Paris Review, fall 2004


A lot of writers ... sit in a log cabin by the lake and put their feet up by the fire in the silence and write. If you can have that that's all very well, but the true writer will learn to write anywhere -- even in prison.

LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS

The Atlantic, October 15, 1997

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Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don't know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

DON DELILLO

Conversations with Don DeLillo


I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.

TANITH LEE

Realms of Fantasy, August 2009

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I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

CORMAC MCCARTHY

The Washington Post, November 13, 2009


It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

JULIAN BARNES

Flaubert's Parrot

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There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a sheet, as in riding across a country.

WALTER BAGEHOT

Literary Studies

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But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

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So basically, it's totally selfish why I write. There are more harmful ways to spend your time, is how I justify it I guess. If my stories can make others laugh, or make others feel unexpected and complicated emotions, well then it's more than feeling good, then it's a bonus, then its rewarding, then you're building community.

TYLER BARTON

"Millennial Writers on Writing", Huffington Post, February 16, 2016


The novelist is like the conductor of an orchestra, his back to the audience, his face invisible, summoning the experience of music for the people he cannot see. The writer as conductor also gets to compose the music and play all of the instruments, a task less formidable than it seems. What it requires is the conscious practice of providing an extraordinary experience for the reader, who should be oblivious to the fact that he is seeing words on paper.

SOL STEIN

Stein on Writing


I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

"Q & A: Author Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Time, June 30, 2009

Tags: Carlos Ruiz Zafon