quotations about writing
Writing sets off a spark in my heart, and I'm going to start a fire.
TIFFANY FERENTINI
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"Millennial Writers on Writing", Huffington Post, February 16, 2016
I've found it incredibly helpful to make writing a routine. I don't sit down with the intention of creating an article that goes viral or some savvy sales page. I sit down and force myself to get my thoughts out on paper or in my laptop. If we choose the same time everyday our physiology is automatically going to start getting prepared to allow thoughts to flow to paper. After awhile of doing this you might even find that your ideas start coming to you shortly before you're scheduled writing time. I've found myself skipping my morning tea because I had such great ideas/thoughts and wanted to quickly get them out of my head and onto paper.
DANIELLE SABRINA
"5 Habits Holding You Back From Creating Great Content", Huffington Post, February 29, 2016
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
interview, Identity Theory, November 16, 2000
Now, writing every day, and being paid for it and encouraged to do it, it was as if, in the midst of the clichéd dark and stormy night, I found the magical inn, its windows golden lit, and Summer was due to start tomorrow. I can only work at one thing well. Deprive me of that, and my "back-up plan," even now, will be the empty, stormy, darkened heath -- where, incidentally, even unpublished, somehow I'll still be writing.
TANITH LEE
interview, Intergalactic Medicine Show
There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
attributed, Literary Agents: How to Get & Work with the Right One for You
What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.
TOM ROBBINS
"In the Creative Process with Tom Robbins; Perfect Sentences, Imperfect Universe", New York Times, December 30, 1993
I believe the most intricate plot won't matter much to readers if they don't care about the characters, especially in a series. So I try to focus hard on making each character, whether villain or hero, have an interesting flaw that readers can relate to.
JEFF ABBOTT
Publisher's Weekly, May 30, 2011
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
GRAHAM GREENE
The End of the Affair
Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.
ANN PATCHETT
Truth and Beauty
Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
SAUL BELLOW
Nobel lecture, December 12, 1976
I would quit while you're ahead. Really, it's an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it's not any good. I would say just stop now. You don't want to do this to yourself. That's my advice to you.
PHILIP ROTH
advice to a young writer, "Writer meets Roth", New York writer Julian Tepper's blog
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
attributed, Bad TV: The Very Best of the Very Worst
When I sit down to write, I have a lot to write, but beforehand, I don't. I'm not full of ideas. Writing is the way I think.
ADAM PHILLIPS
Bomb Magazine, fall 2010
The moment comes when a character does or says something you hadn't thought about. At that moment he's alive and you leave it to him.
GRAHAM GREENE
New York Times, October 9, 1985
As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.
MARGARET ATWOOD
The Blind Assassin
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
attributed, The Book of Poisonous Quotes
In writing, as in speaking, less is more. When you are editing -- which should be immediately after you finish the writing for one session and again at least a day or more after you finished it -- look over the piece with a critical eye and cut, cut, cut.
ALI MADEEH HASHMI
"The art of writing", The News on Sunday, March 11, 2017
No reason at all why one should go on writing just for the sake of it. I think it is very important to stop when you haven't got anything to say.
JULIAN BARNES
The Paris Review, winter 2000