quotations about writing
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
JAMES JOYCE
letter to Fanny Guillermet, September 5, 1918
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
WALTER BAGEHOT
Estimates of Some Englishmen and Scotchmen
When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
Notebooks
There is a part of me in every character, naturally. That's why novelists rarely write good autobiographies. You start one and it becomes another novel.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
New York Times, November 23, 1941
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion.
DAN SIMMONS
Hyperion
Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
The Paris Review, spring 1958
I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.
TANITH LEE
Realms of Fantasy, August 2009
Fine writing is generally the effect of spontaneous thoughts and a labored style.
WILLIAM SHENSTONE
Essays on Men and Manners
Clearly there is no moral obligation to write in any particular way. But there is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless. An artist, in my definition of the word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects.
CHINUA ACHEBE
There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra
You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer--history shows it's better if you're not--but you have to understand your badness.
PETER ABRAHAMS
End of Story
Writing is about growth, challenge and change. Without those things, there's no joy in it.
VERONICA ROTH
"Best-Selling Author Veronica Roth Tells What Writing Books Is Really Like", Entrepreneur, March 30, 2017
To those who no longer have a homeland, writing becomes home.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Minima Moralia
So it is with all great writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of -- as opposed to thinking about themselves -- and to which they have not yet given expression.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFON
"Q & A: Author Carlos Ruiz Zafon", Time, June 30, 2009
I am not someone who is very good at writing a certain amounts every day. I know that's what one is told one should do, but what I tend to do is kind of sequester myself away while I am in London for a few weeks at a time and become very antisocial and write very, very intensively over a relatively short time. I am much more of a burst writer than a steady-state writer.
CHINA MIÉVILLE
"In a Carapace of Light: A Conversation with China Miéville", Clarkesworld
You are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Motion of Light in Water
With pen and with pencil we're learning to say
Nothing, more cleverly every day.
WILLIAM ALLINGHAM
"Blackberries"
When I'm writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness.
MAYA ANGELOU
The Paris Review, fall 1990
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
KURT VONNEGUT
attributed, The Biteback Dictionary of Humorous Literary Quotations
When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
REBECCA WEST
The Paris Review, spring 1981