Quotes on Writing

The exit is usually where the entrance was.

Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.

The learned fool writes his nonsense in better language than the unlearned, but it is still nonsense.

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear. Before using a fine word, make a place for it.

Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from.

I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don't understand.

My father, a bookkeeper who never earned more than $11,000 a year in his life, sat there, writing out a $25 check to the NAACP. When I asked him why, he said discrimination against anyone is discrimination against us all. And I never forgot that. Indeed, his philanthropy was a gift, not just to that organization, but to me.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.

It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

Let those who will write the nation's laws, if I can write its textbooks.

I just love life. I love people. I love to write, that's my gift. I love to sing. I have a good attitude. I like to think I shine from the inside.

Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon.

I blame myself for not often enough seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Somewhere in his journals, Dostoyevky remarks that a writer can begin anywhere, at the most commonplace thing, scratch around in it long enough, pry and dig away long enough, and lo!, soon he will hit upon the marvelous.

Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person-a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead: (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, nce in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening.