quotations about writing
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
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
There is as much variety of pluck in writing across a sheet, as in riding across a country.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Literary Studies
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
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Notebooks
When you finish one book, you don't want to just write the same book again.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Slate, October 10, 2011
Ideas are infinite--writers are hardwired to think that way. We keep it fresh by using new people, mixing character types and putting them in a different setting. It's always the first book all over again, but one idea can be told a thousand different ways. There are 88 keys on the piano, but you can make an infinite amount of music from those keys.
NORA ROBERTS
Time Magazine, November 29, 2007
What separates the professionally successful ... from all the rest is their ability to stay steady, to have stamina. It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.
KATY LEDERER
interview, Identity Theory, February 12, 2005
The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing it well or you're doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That is actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.
JOHN GREEN
"July 19: A Day in the Life of a Writer (Who Has No Friends)", YouTube
He who will not listen to any advice, nor be corrected in his writings, is a rank pedant.
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Works of the Mind", Les Caractères
The art is never about what you write about. The art is about how you write about what you write about.
CHRIS ABANI
attributed, Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction
I've never written the things I'd like to write that I've admired all my life. Maybe one never does.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
EMIL CIORAN
The Trouble with Being Born
A story is a letter that the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
The Shadow of the Wind
You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer--history shows it's better if you're not--but you have to understand your badness.
PETER ABRAHAMS
End of Story
I tend to write things seven times before I show them to my editor. I write them seven times, then I take them on tour, read them like a dozen times on tour, then go back to the room and rewrite, read and rewrite, and I try to learn as much as I can on my own before I show it to my editor at The New Yorker. I would never show him a first draft, because then he's really going to be sick of it by the twelfth draft.
DAVID SEDARIS
Oasis Magazine, June 2008
Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.
DONALD BARTHELME
"On Paraguay"
Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.
JACK LONDON
Martin Eden
I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, but writing was always first. It's a kind of pain I can't do without.
ROBERT PENN WARREN
National Observer, March 12, 1977