Quotes on Writing

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I’ve thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

I think the idea of art kills creativity.

Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’…. Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.

Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.

When I write about a 15-year old, I jump, I return to the days when I was that age. It's like a time machine. I can remember everything. I can feel the wind. I can smell the air. Very actually. Very vividly.

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.

Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

All I try to do is write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it.

When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive.

More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.

I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer.