John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) My father thought that I had too many words to get out all at once. So, I didn’t speak very pleasingly, but I never stopped speaking or trying to communicate this way, and I think the stuttering has gotten better over the years. I have …
Khaled Hosseini On Writing
Khaled Hosseini (March 04, 1965 -) There is a romantic notion to writing a novel, especially when you are starting it. You are embarking on this incredibly exciting journey, and you're going to write your first novel, you're going to write a book. Until you're about 50 pages into it, and that romance wears off, …
Philip Milton Roth On Writing
Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) Writing turns you into somebody who’s always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn’t completely wreck your life.
William Lewis Safire On Writing
William Lewis Safire (December 17, 1929 – September 27, 2009) Composition is a discipline; it forces us to think. If you want to 'get in touch with your feelings,' fine — talk to yourself; we all do. But, if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put …
Dani Shapiro On Writing
Dani Shapiro (April 10, 1962 -) When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don’t want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn’t just …
Henry James On Writing
Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916) There it is round you. Don't pass it by — the immediate, the real, the only, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for. Take hold of it and keep hold, and let it pull you where it will.
Virginia Woolf On Writing
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference …
