Quotes on Writing

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it's like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.

Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains.

I write in the morning at a table, longhand on yellow legal pads, just like Nixon, when I’m doing fiction.

One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.

The professorial dictum has always been to write what you know, but I say write what you don't know and find something out. And it works.

Two very simple rules: _x000D_ A. You don't have to write. _x000D_ B. You can't do anything else _x000D_ The rest comes of itself.

Writing has... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.

That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives.

Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

Damn the age. I'll write for antiquity.

I only wish I could write with both hands, so as not to forget one thing while I am saying another.

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.

The wickedness of a loose or profane author is more atrocious than that of a giddy libertine or drunken ravisher, not only because it extends its effects wider, as a pestilence that taints the air is more destructive than poison infused in a draught, but because it is committed with cool deliberation.

The agent never receipts his bill, puts his hat on and bows himself out. He stays around forever, not only for as long as you can write anything that anyone will buy, but as long as anyone will buy any portion of any right to anything that you ever did write. He just takes ten per cent of your life.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

A mission statement is not something you write overnight... But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

To exact of every man who writes that he should say something new, would be to reduce authors to a small number; to oblige the most fertile genius to say only what is new, would be to contract his volumes to a few pages. Yet, surely, there ought to be some bounds to repetition; libraries ought no more to be heaped for ever with the same thoughts differently expressed, than with the same books differently decorated.