Writing Quotes

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining to...

Writing is a communication.

Once I had all the facts in, I found I didn't have the immoral courage to pull the caper. So I wrote...

Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer becau...

But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who...

A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest.

My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial inte...

Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly mun...

The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.

not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before ...

The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human a...

Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large num...

When I first read Lovecraft around 1971, and even more so when I began to read about his life, I imm...

Solitary writers come out of nowhere and do not belong anywhere. They are not domesticated or social...

Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermos...

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man...

Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of...

To tell you the truth, though, I still haven't made up my mind whether I shall publish at all. Taste...

A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlie...

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to f...

What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was th...

Two questions form the foundation of all novels: "What if?" and "What next?" (A third question, "Wha...

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of gi...

This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantasti...

I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, a...

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral stru...

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the tr...

In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seem...

The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream alo...

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can a...

I like pens. My writing is so amazing there's never a need to erase.

Not every story started off big enough to notice.

The first time I tried to write was when I was 14, after I got an electric guitar. I put a song toge...

The one thing emphasized in any creative writing course is 'write what you know,' and that automatic...

Rules such as "Write what you know," and "Show, don't tell," while doubtlessly grounded in good sens...

I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse ...

She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obsc...

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth w...

If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done.

I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I t...

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge...

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

When you write, it's making a certain kind of music in your head. There's a rhythm to it, a pulse, a...

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held b...

If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do i...

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can...

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in ...

He likes a day in the studio to end, he says, "when my knees are all skinned up and my pants are wet...

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.

Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look...

(W)hat I write when I force myself is generally just as good as what I write when I'm feeling inspir...

I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enorm...

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but w...

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to clo...

I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it...

I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to thi...

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you ...

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contra...

Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, ...

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] ...

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an in...

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has...

When I return to the writing process after being away from it for a while, the first part of it alwa...

That's not writing that's typing.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even mo...

What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s even...

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

Before publication, and if provided by persons whose judgment you trust, yes, of course criticism he...

It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell -- a grain of sand t...

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born...

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there's no point in it. . ....

You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.

It's a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up some...

To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make.

Throughout our lives, after all, we look for a story of our origins, to tell us why we were born and...

I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembe...

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse th...

From shit, thus, I extract pure Shinola

There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is...

I wrote a novel because I had a yen to do it. I believe this is sufficient reason to set out to tell...

When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rule...

I felt like poisoning a monk.

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

Is it possible to say "It was a beautiful morning at the end of November" without feeling like Snoop...

Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opp...

[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to...

In the Middle Ages, cathedrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a...