Writing Quotes - Page 236

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.

There is a side of friendship that develops better and stronger by correspondence than contact.... The absence of the flesh in writing perhaps brings souls nearer.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.

What is being said is the effect of something that has happened; at the same time, what is being said is in itself something happening, which will, in turn, leave its effect.

Recollect that to a woman who gets her living by her pen, 'time is money,' as it is to an artist. Therefore, encroaching on her time is lessening her income. And yet how often is this done (either heedlessly or selfishly) by persons professing to be her friends, and who are habitually in the practice of interrupting her in her writing hours.

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

It is the winners who write history - their way.

A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.

For the writer, discovering the work he will write is both like a miracle and a wound, like the miracle of the wound.

My last page is always latent in my first; but the intervening windings of the way become clear only as I write.

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

There are two words for everything.

Expansion, that is the idea the novelist must cling to, not completion, not rounding off, but opening out.

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies....Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world.

Well, write poetry, for God's sake, it's the only thing that matters.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation-it is the Self-escaping into the open.

An editor is a person who knows more about writing than writers do but who has escaped the terrible desire to write.

My biggest kick in music -playing or writing- is when I have a problem. Without a problem to solve, how much interest do you take in anything?

I think I liked writing a novel better. Obviously, it's more rewarding. It's that marathon thing where it sucks when you're doing it, but you're proud of yourself at the end, and you've done it, and at the very least, nobody can take that away from you.

I used to go to the library all the time when I was kid. As a teenager, I got a book on how to write jokes at the library, and that, in turn, launched my comedy career.

Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.