All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“Behind the perfection of a man’s style, must lie the passion of a man’s soul.”

“Writing starts with living.—Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing”

“The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself it is all right as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, “This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but if I’m such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay,” you’re sunk. If they aren’t in interesting situations, characters can’t be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.”(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)”

“Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life, in understanding and in creating. There is no measuring in time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.”

“Is it possible to say “It was a beautiful morning at the end of November” without feeling like Snoopy?”

“To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not–this is the beginning of writing.”

“One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”

“If only these walls could talk…the world would know just how hard it is to tell the truth in a story in which everyone’s a liar.”

“Above all things — read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.”

“After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”

“I kill my loneliness by reading and (then) writing, damn.”

“That, incidentally, gives me the greatest possible pleasure—the knowledge that we are all linked by our friendship with a group of fictional people. What a pleasant club of which to be a member! [from the preface; on writing for people around the world]”

“The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he’d trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear — for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in “Olalla” when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister’s hand.”

“Silently I dance a dance of chaos to the rhythm of a dying sun”

“Polysyllables obfuscate a preponderant ignorance with so much more style and panache.”