Quotes on Writing

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

To live is to war with trolls in heart and woul. To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.

The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen.

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers.

What most of us must be involved in--whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do--has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world.

The habit of writing for my eye is good practice. It loosens the ligaments.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.

Finish. The difference between being a writer and being a person of talent is the discipline it takes to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and finish. Don't talk about doing it. Do it. Finish.

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle.

I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.

That is why I write - to try to turn sadness into longing, solitude into remembrance.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.

some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.