Quotes on Writing

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

Writing should be the settlement of dew on the leaf.

I write and sing about whatever I am able to understand and feel.

You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

There is something magical about putting a problem in writing. It is almost as though by writing about what is wrong, you start to discover new ways of making it right.

Somebody said that writers are like otters... Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they'll do a better trick or a different trick because they'd already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We've done it, so let's do something different.

I do feel that if you can write one good sentence and then another good sentence and then another, you end up with a good story.

I'm very clever _x000D_ at _x000D_ hiding poems _x000D_ perhaps more _x000D_ clever than I _x000D_ am _x000D_ at _x000D_ writing _x000D_ them.

It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.

About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives.

The power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean - hell, I know that.

The word "photography" can be interpreted as "writing with light" or "drawing with light." Some photographers are producing beautiful photographs by drawing with light.. Some other photographers are trying to tell something with their photographs. They are writing with light.

In fact, merely writing the facts on a piece of paper and stating our problem clearly goes a long way toward helping us to reach a sensible decision.

But then, that's the beauty of writing stories-each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there's no feeling like it.

Just write every day of your life. Read intensely.

To idealize: all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

I can honestly say [that writing] is the best life there is, because you get to live within the realm of your own mind, and that is a profoundly rare human privilege.

Writing at least is a silent meditation even though you’re going a hundred miles an hour.