Quotes on Writing

You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.

I write the way women have babies. You don't know it's going to be like that. If you did, there's no way you would go through with it.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

A writer in someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.

Good writing is good conversation, only more so.

Letter writing is the only device combining solitude with good company.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side

If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it.

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them.

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.

The great thing about fantasy is that you can drag dreams and longings and hopes and fears and strivings out of your subconscious and call them 'magic' or 'dragons' or 'faeries' and get to know them better. But then I write the stuff. Obviously I'm prejudiced.

It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

So to the wretched writer I should like to say that there’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: the body of your work itself; for you must remember that your attentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is love that brings it own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them