Explore Quotes on Writing

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.

Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.

[N]othing is as surprising as life. Except for writing. Except for writing. Yes, of course, except for writing, the only consolation.

I think it's difficult, if you're a quite private person like I am, to write about your life very intimately.

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

...in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.

A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

I have always wanted to write a book that ended with the word 'mayonnaise.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

I believe that the most important single thing, beyond discipline and creativity is daring to dare.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

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