Quotes on Writing

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

You can have a very intense relationship with fictional characters because they are in your own head.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

Forget it. Never explain; never apologize. You can either write posthumously or you can't.

Peter Rabbit, for all its gentle tininess, loudly proclaims that no story is worth the writing, no picture worth the making, if it is not a work of imagination.

I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like "fidelity" and "adultery", by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that I had him I'd be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting Bennett, hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing helped. I was possessed. The minute he walked into a room and smiled at me, I was a goner.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

The things that make you a functional citizen in society - manners, discretion, cordiality - don't necessarily make you a good writer. Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners.

A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.

Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy—“to stand outside”—comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

I am not here [in the sanitarium] to write, but to be mad.

If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it.

I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak that is paradise. Let the Gods forgive what I have made Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.

To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.

You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing.

The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself.