Quotes on Writing

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.

Whatever you do, make sure you want to write more than you want to be a writer. Make sure you want to act more than you want to be an actor. That is what will sustain you.

If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing. I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.

There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

Every year I tell myself that I’m not going to read any reviews and then I do. We’re all human and when I read something negative it hurts. I think when you write it’s part of the game, you’re going to get some good reviews and some bad reviews and that’s how it goes. I don’t write for the reviews.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

There's a difference between ad-libbing and improvising. And there's a difference between not knowing what to do and just saying something. Or making choices as an actor. As a writer also, as a person who's making a film, as a cameraman, everything is a choice. And it seems to me I don't really have to direct anyone or write down that somebody's getting drunk; all I have to do is say that there's a bottle there and put a bottle there and then they're going to get drunk.

You write to become immortal, or because the piano happens to be open, or you've looked into a pair of beautiful eyes.

I understand now my father really thought he was doing me good. Education means a lot to Palestinians. We’ve become some of the most educated people in the world through our diaspora. We’ve had to be. When you ain’t got land, your degree may be your only solid ground. May father felt (feels) that being a doctor would give me security. How can I explain that I’m not safe from anything if I don’t write?

Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.

A person's tragedy does not make up their entire life. A story carves deep grooves into our brains each time we tell it. But we aren't one story. We can change our stories. We can write our own.

I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks.

I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare.

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.

Dream dreams and write them aye, but live them first.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It’s usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.