John Hoyer Updike (March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009) No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news. Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first 20 years on earth are most writers' main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant. …
Andrea Barrett On Writing And Science
Andrea Barrett (November 16, 1954 -) I think science and writing are utterly the same thing. They are completely rooted in passion and desire, if they’re any good at all. You can fall in love with the natural world in the same way you fall in love with a person. There’s that same sense of …
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 …
Nadine Gordimer On Writing
Nadine Gordimer (November 20, 1923 – July 13, 2014) All worthwhile writing... comes from an individual vision, privately pursued.
Stephen Dunn On Writing
Stephen Dunn (1939 -) You must be a little driven, and what you're doing must be crucial to you in order not to be defeated by the likely neglect that awaits you, the lack of rewards, and the fact that, by and large, your culture doesn't take you seriously.
Stephen Dunn On Writing
Stephen Dunn (1939 -) I think one of my early motivations for writing was that other people's versions of experience didn't gel with my own. It was a gesture toward sanity to try to get the world right for myself. I've since learned that if you get it right for yourself, it often has resonance …
Anne Rice On Writing
Anne Rice (October 04, 1941 -) There are no rules. It’s amazing how willing people are to tell you that you aren’t a real writer unless you conform to their clichés and their rules. My advice? Reject rules and critics out of hand. Define yourself. Do it your way. Make yourself the writer of your …
Leo Rosten On Writing
Leo Rosten (April 11, 1908 – February 19, 1997) A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much …
Ann Proulx On Writing
Edna Ann 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 -) The fantasy exists that once certain hurdles have been gotten through, this art turns much simpler, that inspiration never falters, and public opinion is always affirmative, and there's no struggle, there's no torment, there's no sense that the thing you've embarked on is a catastrophe.
Raymond Thornton Chandler On Writing
Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 – March 26, 1959) The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never …
Virginia Woolf On Writing And Sex
Adeline Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
William Goldman On Writing
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 …
