quotations about writing
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
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"Who Has Time to Be a Writer?", Salon, August 11, 1998
Writing is a part of healing, of digging into society.
KHALED KHALIFA
"Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa tells the stories of a bleeding, beautiful country", Syria Direct, March 23, 2017
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
Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.
JAMES M. CAIN
The Paris Review, spring-summer 1978
To finish is sadness to a writer--a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Paris Review, fall 1975
How hard is the destiny of a maker of books! He has to cut and sew up in order to make ideas follow logically. But when one writes a book on reverie, has the time not come to let the pen run, to let reverie speak, and better yet to dream the reverie at the same time one believes he is transcribing it?
GASTON BACHELARD
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos
Write only of what is important and eternal.
ANTON CHEKHOV
The Seagull
Good fiction creates its own reality.
NORA ROBERTS
The Stanislaski Brothers
A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
"Notebook B", The Waste Books
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
Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.
JACK LONDON
"Getting Into Print", Editor magazine, 1903
A plain narrative of any remarkable fact, emphatically related, has a more striking effect without the author's comment.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
JOHN STEINBECK
New York Times, June 2, 1969
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
GRAHAM GREENE
New York Times, October 9, 1985
The only characters I've made to resemble real people have been grotesques.
GLEN COOK
interview, SF Site, September 2005
The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.
LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Six Characters in Search of an Author
A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.
ANDRÉ MAUROIS
The Art of Writing
Yet do not miss the moral, my good men.
For Saint Paul says that all that's written well
Is written down some useful truth to tell.
Then take the wheat and let the chaff lie still.
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
The Canterbury Tales
Everybody can write; writers can't do anything else.
MIGNON MCLAUGHLIN
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook
All stories must end so, with the next tale winking out of the corners of the last pages, promising more, promising moonlight and dancing and revels, if only you will come back when spring comes again.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making