Quotes on Writing

Writers who think THEY are being criticized when only that writing is being criticized are beyond a teacher's reach. Writing can only be learned when a writer coldly separates himself from what he has written and looks at it with the objectivity of a plumber examining a newly piped bathroom to see if he got all the joints tight.

I love the secrecy of writing fiction. When I write a novel, I don't tell anybody what I'm doing. I'm living in my private world. And it's a great sensation.

I had enormous self-image, problems and very low self-esteem, which I hid behind obsessive writing and performing. It's exactly what I do now except I enjoy it now. I'm not driven like I was in my twenties. I was driven to get through life very quickly.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.

I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

My writing comes not from the happy moments, but from struggle and grief.

Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.

Writing and cookery are just two different means of communication.

If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.

If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write 'damnation' with your fingers.

I'm only really alive when I'm writing.

Write to register history, and name each thing. Write what should not be forgotten.

I make no complaint. I am a writer. I do not accept my condition; I will strive to change it; but I inhabit it, I am trying to learn from it.