Quotes on Writing

If a fish is born in your aquarium and you call him John, write out a birth certificate, tell him about his family history, and in two minutes he gets eaten by another fish - that's tragic. But it's only tragic because you projected a separate self where there was none. You got hold of a fraction of dynamic process, a molecular dance, and a separate entity out of it.

This at least should be a rule through the letter-writing world: that no angry letter be posted till four-and-twenty hours will have elapsed since it was written.

Everything of mine is permeated with my love of ideas-both big and small. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it grabs me and holds me, facinates me. And then I'll run out and something about it... I write for fun.

Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.

You're a writer. And that's something better than being a millionaire. Because it's something holy.

I don't judge in my books. I don't have to have the antagonist get shot or the protagonist win. It's just how it comes out. I'm just telling a story.

A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.

I would not be interested in writing if I didn't feel that what I wrote was an act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen.

I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand.

There is no pleasure in the world like writing well and going fast. It's like nothing else. It's like a love affair, it goes on and on, and doesn't end in marriage. It's all courtship.

The work of a writer, his continuing work, depends for breath of life on a certain privacy of heart.

Rest and be kind, you don't have to prove anything

Somehow, some way, incredibly enough, good writing ultimately gets recognized. If you're a really good writer and deserve that honored position, then by God, you'll write, and you'll be read.

To write an autobiography, you've got to expose other people. I hope to get out of this world as gracefully as possible, without embarrassing anyone.

I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.

My mother raised me to be a writer.

Prose should have a flow, the forward momentum of a certain energized weight; it should feel like a voice tumbling in your ear.

I am paid by the word, so I always write the shortest words possible.

I feel that I am writing out of a full life. I am a rich man, rich in men known, in adventures had. I am rich with living.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.