WRITING QUOTES XVIII

quotations about writing

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

SYLVIA PLATH

The Journals of Sylvia Plath

Tags: Sylvia Plath


I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have.

JOHN GREEN

"Nov. 26th: Writing Advice (And Notes on Surnameless Tiffany)", YouTube

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Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON

"An interview with Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Book Browse

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After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.

GEORGE ADE

"The Fable of the Bohemian Who Had Hard Luck", Fables in Slang

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After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.

ROGER ZELAZNY

interview, Phlogiston, 1995

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[Rejection] made me quit writing once. For six months. I started up again when my then seven-year-old son asked me to start writing again because I was too grumpy when I wasn't writing.

KIRBY LARSON

interview, Author Turf, March 6, 2014


Writing is creative, which is right brain activity. Editing is rational, logical and process/rule driven, which is left-brain activity. It seems that, if you switch consistently between the two, the creative process becomes derailed by all the rules and forms. You scare it back into the shadows.

DAVID CHISLETT

"Editing Is Not Writing", Books LIVE, February 12, 2016


We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind--mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

J. G. BALLARD

Crash

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This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of--please forgive me--wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.

ANNE LAMOTT

Bird by Bird

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There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

Don Quixote

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The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

CHARLES DE LINT

The Blue Girl

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The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.

ANAÏS NIN

The Diary of Anaïs Nin


The reason I write so slowly is because I try never to leave a sentence until it's as perfect as I can make it. So there isn't a word in any of my books that hasn't been gone over 40 times.

TOM ROBBINS

"In the Creative Process with Tom Robbins; Perfect Sentences, Imperfect Universe", New York Times, December 30, 1993

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The greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

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So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.

KOBO ABE

The Face of Another

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Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

PHILIP ROTH

attributed, Literary Agents: How to Get & Work With the Right One For You


Most writer zombies don't realize they are the undead, because they do just enough to convince themselves (and others) that they are actual writers. They talk a lot about writing -- boy, are writer zombies great talkers -- going on for hours about the screenplay or pilot they're supposedly writing or will write once they have the time. They also read writing books and blogs and take seminars because that makes them feel like they are in the game. And they take classes, especially those that impose short-term deadlines, because that gets them writing, which makes them feel alive. But once the class is over, they almost always go back to their zombie ways.

COREY MANDELL

"Beware the Writing Zombies", Huffington Post, February 25, 2016


Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage--that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.

WYNDHAM LEWIS

The Art of Being Ruled

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It is usual that the moment you write for publication--I mean one of course--one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness.

JOHN STEINBECK

The Paris Review, fall 1975


It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

LOUISE ERDRICH

The Paris Review, winter 2010