Quotes on Writing

Let us have integrity and not write checks with our tongues which our conduct cannot cash.

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.

All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.

I could not think without writing.

Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound, Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.

When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

I don't think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then 'smile darkly and ignore the howls.' Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.

I have said before, and I shall say again, that I write this book for love of your love.

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit