William Goldman (August 12, 1931 -) Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own …
Norman Mailer On Writing
Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, “I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel.” The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love.
Denise Levertov On Writing
Denise Levertov (October 24, 1923 - December 20, 1997) Strength of feeling, reverence for mystery, and clarity of intellect must be kept in balance with one another. Neither the passive nor the active must dominate, they must work in conjunction, as in a marriage.
Charles Bukowski On Creativity And Writing
Charles Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) Somebody [...] asked me: 'What do you do? How do you write, create?' You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: 'not' to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It's like a …
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Alice Koller On Writing
Alice Koller The only “doing” that’s the same every day is that most writers go to the same desk and chair that we sat in and worked at yesterday, and that the “working” is with the same computer, and the same pen, or the same kind of pen, each with a different color of ink. …
Nell Freudenberger On Writing
Nell Freudenberger I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn’t have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private — a comforting thought. If you can make that distinction in your head, you can write just the way you always did, …
Elizabeth Bowen On Writing
Elizabeth Bowen (7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) I am sure that in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt. It's a sign, I suppose, of life's decreasing livableness as life that people should feel it possible to make themselves felt in so few …
Jamaica Kincaid On Writing
Jamaica Kincaid (May 25, 1949 -) When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself. And while I'm doing it, I really have the feeling that this time, at the end of it, I will be other than myself. Of course, every time …
Michael Chabon On Writing
Michael Chabon (May 24, 1963 -) I think that if I learned anything, it's that you can feel completely despairing and hopeless and in over your head and lost and incompetent in the course of writing a book, but that doesn't mean all those things are true. You can fight your way through those periods …
Rosellen Brown On Writing
Rosellen Brown Writing, getting something down on the page, is a gratification that, like a child faced with a candy bar and an empty stomach, I have trouble postponing.
Charles Simic On Writing
Charles Simic (May 09, 1938 -) I write to annoy God, to make Death laugh. I write because I can't get it right. I write because I want every woman in the world to fall in love with me.
Annie Dillard On Writing
Annie Dillard (April 30, 1945 -) One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it …
John Updike On Speaking And Writing
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 …
Jane Kenyon On Writing
Jane Kenyon (May 23, 1947–April 22, 1995) Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours… Tell the whole …
Ann Patchett On Writing
Ann Patchett (December 2, 1963 -) You don't step out of the stream of your life to do your work. Work was the life, and who you were as a mother, teacher, friend, citizen, activist, and artist was all the same person. People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say …
Donald Andrew Hall On Writing
Donald Andrew Hall Hall (September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018) The great pleasure of being a writer is in the act of writing, and surely there is some pleasure in being published and being praised. I don’t mean to be complacent about what I have some of. But the greater pleasure is in the …
Anaïs Nin On Writing
Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Rachel Carson On Writing
Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) Writing is a lonely occupation at best. Of course there are stimulating and even happy associations with friends and colleagues, but during the actual work of creation the writer cuts himself off from all others and confronts his subject alone. He moves into a realm where he has …
Neil Young On Writing
Neil Young (November 12, 1945 -) Writing is very convenient, has a low expense and is a great way to pass the time. I highly recommend it to any old rocker who is out of cash and doesn’t know what to do next.
Margaret Atwood On Writing
Margaret Atwood (November 18, 1939 -) You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you’re on your own. Nobody is …
Robert Stone On Writing
Robert Stone (August 21, 1937– January 10, 2015) Writing is lonely. [...] But most of the time you are in a room by yourself, you know. Writers spend more time in rooms, staying awake in quiet rooms, than they do hunting lions in Africa. So, it's a bad life for a person because it's so …
William Burroughs On Writing
William Burroughs (February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) They asked me if I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing. My answer is most emphatically yes, I would go on writing for company.
Jamaica Kincaid On Writing
In recognition of Black History Month, Transformation Publications will present poems, essays, and other artistic creations by Black artists, musicians, and writers. Jamaica Kincaid (May 25, 1949 -) When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself. And while I'm doing it, I …
Annie Proulx On Writing
Annie Proulx (August 22, 1935 -) You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different worlds on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
Louise Glück On Writing
Louise Glück (April 22, 1943 -) Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
William Strunk Jr On Writing
William Strunk Jr. (July 1, 1869 – September 26, 1946) Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, …
Ralph Ellison On Writing
Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget …
