Explore Quotes on Writing

Writers do not live one life, they live two. There is the living and then there is the writing. There is the second tasting, the delayed reaction.

The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.

There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

The trouble with writing a book about yourself is that you can’t fool around. If you write about someone else, you can stretch the truth from here to Finland. If you write about yourself the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

It smells terrible in here.' Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.

You can fix anything but a blank page.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

The first step in making rabbit stew is catching the rabbit.

And I could write it better than you ever felt it.

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.

Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.

No matter where; of comfort no man speak: Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs; Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth

Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.

The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.

Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.

you must not come lightly to the blank page.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.