Quotes on Writing

The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.

Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.

Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, We fell them down and turn them into paper, That we may record our emptiness.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always be seen as untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

I like any and all of my associations with music: writing, playing, and listening. We write and play from our perspective, and the audience listens from its perspective. If and when we agree, I am lucky.

The audience today has heard every joke. They know every plot. They know where you're going before you even start. That's a tough audience to surprise, and a tough audience to write for. It's much more competitive now, because the audience is so much more - I want to say sophisticated.

It's a fact, the majority of films in Hollywood are from the male perspective. And the female characters, very rarely do they get to speak to another female character in a movie, and when they do it's usually about a guy, not anything else. So they're very male-centric, Hollywood films, in general. So I think it's incredible that Ned Benson, when I said I'd love to know where she goes, says okay, I'm going to write another film from the female perspective.

Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.

One writes out of one thing only - one's own experience.

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.

Camera lies all the time. It’s all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you… the moment you’ve made a choice, you’re lying about something larger. Lying is an ugly word. I don’t mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

You’re talking about Rwanda or Bangladesh, or Cambodia, or the Philippines. They’ve got democracy, according to Freedom House. But have you got a civilised life to lead? People want economic development first and foremost. The leaders may talk something else. You take a poll of any people. What is it they want? The right to write an editorial as you like? They want homes, medicine, jobs, schools.

When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.

Then somebody suggested I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how I could write it

When you write from your gut and let the stuff stay flawed and don't let anybody tell you to make it better, it can end up looking like nothing else.