Writing Quotes
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The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy The books that people talk about we never can recall And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.
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I think I was also afraid of the novel. I write line by line, proceeding at snail's pace, rewriting as I go and paring the excess away. This is against all the best advice for writing long form prose, and I have tried over the years to break myself of the habit, but I can't bear to leave anything ungainly on the page and half the fun for me is that tinkering. So the length of a novel was a daunting prospect.
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Everything that I write comes when it wants to, out of its own need and it dictates its form. I don't say, "I am going to write a novel."
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Nothing teaches you as much about writing dialogue as listening to it.
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Once you're into a story everything seems to apply-what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.
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I needed it to have experiences I could write about. I thought I was someone who had nothing to say.
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The difficult part of writing about someone you don't admire is that it's easy to demonize them. What you get then is a cackling villain, twirling their mustache at every dastardly deed they commit.
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Comedy is underrepresented in every actor's life, because it's so bloody difficult to write.
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What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.
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If anything in your life is more important than writing - anything at all - you should walk away now while you still can. Forewarned is forearmed. For those who cannot or will not walk away, you need only to remember this. Writing is life. Breathe deeply of it.
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When I'm writing in long hand, it just goes on and on and on. When I was in the saloon business, I would just greet people and talk to them and avoid taxes, and getting behind the bar. What else.
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I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.
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I feel very much a part of what I'm writing about, and I'm writing about things that concern me on a daily basis. I'm not really interested in writing musical diaries, if you know what I mean.
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I could not write about a subject sacred to me because I would be too flippant. Fortunately, there are no subjects sacred to me.
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Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.
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I came to Hollywood originally writing comedy and writing satire.
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By the second half of the second century, apologies had become a popular form of Christian writing.
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You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.
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Writing helps me create a different world that I can escape to.
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I caution writers all the time to slow down and pay more attention to the work in front of them than to the end result. I don't think you write one book and get anywhere. I think you write five books and then maybe you are finally on the right path.
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The great artist is the simplifier.
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I feel like math and writing are the same thing. You're putting together a lot of complex things to satisfy different requirements. It's got to be aesthetically pleasing; it's got to have subtext; it's got to convey information.
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Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself - perhaps even too much - in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness.
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Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
