Quotes on Writing

The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.

The dubious privilege of a freelance writer is he’s given the freedom to starve anywhere.

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is. And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or those we love. And least of all - which is so important, too - to those we do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force...When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life.

Writing is the geometry of the soul.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be, written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.

If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more. And if you can’t write an intelligent answer to those questions, don’t do it.

Clutter is the disease of American writing.

I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.

Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.

You know that I become quite powerless whenever I am obliged to write for an instrument which I cannot bear.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.

Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope, some day, to find something to say.