All Quotes By Tag: Writing

“Writing is the only art form where a good number of the artists make a slice of their living criticizing one another in print, in public. ”

“…stories want to be told. Stories have a power of their own … you can’t write a story until you’ve felt it. Breathed it in. Walked with your characters. Talked with them.”

“Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.”(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)”

“The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati…when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.”

“Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.”

“Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”

“When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes. Even before anyone has read it, before eyes other than its creator’s have looked upon a single phrase, it is irretrievably altered. It has become a book that can be read, that no longer belongs to its maker. It has acquired, in a sense, free will. It will make its journey through the world and there is no longer anything the author can do about it. Even he, as he looks at its sentences, reads them differently now that they can be read by others. They look like different sentences. The book has gone out into the world and the world has remade it.”

“I have a pesky little critic in the back of my mind. He’s a permanent fixture and passes judgment on everything I write.In order to placate him, especially when I’m endeavoring to write anything as ambitious as a novel, I have to constantly mutter, ‘I’m not writing a masterpiece, I’m not writing a masterpiece.’This mantra lulls him into a kind of stupor so that he pays no attention to what I’m doing, because after all, I’m not claiming it’s any good. Slowly, and secretly, one page at a time, I write my story.I know I’ve succeeded when he grudgingly admits, ‘That’s pretty good.’ And if I’m lucky, every once in a while, I blow him away.”

“You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you’re not. That’d be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the ‘hello’ is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya?”

“I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.”

“On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.”

“I really think that writing about sex is writing about the mind.”

“Beginnings are so important. Just finding that right moment to introduce this character, this world, it’s everything.”

“If the voices in your head make you cry, you’re a lunatic. Put their words on paper, and you’re a writer.”

“Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.”