My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing. It's an invented condition, a literary version of the judicial "abuse excuse." Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.
Thomas Mallon (See Toni Morrison below)
I soon learned that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must write write write.
Henry Miller
The truly great writer does not want to write. He wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination.
Henry Miller
Writing is Crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain & sorrow to commemorate an event which is intransmissible.
Henry Miller
The artist who becomes thoroughly aware consequently ceases to be one.
Henry Miller
I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.
James Michner, The World is My Home
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for the money.
Moliere
When I sit down in order to write, sometimes it's there; sometimes it's not. But that doesn't bother me anymore. I tell my students that there is such a thing as "writers block," and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now
Toni Morrison (See Thomas Mallon above)
Remember: Writing can get you fed to a lion whose teeth draw your whole face into its foul wet breath and cut your skull with knives. There's no soft way to put this. A black hole swallows you up. Willpower's no help. Getting in print is like beating cancer but losing a lung, staying in print is hopeless. Your best work goes begging.....Today's paragraph comes, a word from the heart of the universe, and shines in the darkness, unquenched. And you ask for power, wisdom, and love as you make the anvil sing.
Donald Newlove
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say but what we are unable to say.
Anaïs Nin
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.
Anaïs Nin - February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5 as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38
If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anaïs Nin
The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness.
Anaïs Nin
When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.
Flannery O'Connor
I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.
Blaise Pascal
When I say artist I don’t mean in the narrow sense of the word—but the man who is building things—creating molding the earth—whether it be the plains of the west—or the iron ore of Penn. It’s all a big game of construction—some with a brush—some with a shovel—some choose a pen.
Jackson Pollock
Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.
Jean Paul Richter
The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
William Saroyan - The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories (1934) Preface.
When one’s not writing poems — and I’m not at the moment — you wonder how you ever did it. It’s like another country you can’t reach.
May Sarton
An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts on himself.
Irwin Shaw
Writing is not a profession, but a vocation of unhappiness.
Georges Simenon
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.
Red Smith
If you would be pungent, be brief, for it is with words as with sunbeams--the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Hard writing makes easy reading.
Wallace Stegner
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
John Steinbeck
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
John Steinbeck - New York Times, (June 2, 1969)
The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.
John Steinbeck - Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (1962)
The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit — for gallantry in defeat — for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.
John Steinbeck - Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (1962)
Character is a given. Don’t explain. Have the character act. Readers don’t become unsympathetic when characters do wrong. They become more sympathetic.
Dan Stolar
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard
Omit needless words. 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.
William Strunk, Jr. Elements of Style
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
William Styron
If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.
Henry David Thoreau
How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
Henry David Thoreau
I have found that a story leaves a deeper impression when it is impossible to tell which side the author is on.
Leo Tolstoy
A man who thinks much of his words as he writes them will generally leave behind him work that smells of oil.
Anthony Trollope
An essential element for good writing is a good ear: One must listen to he sound of one's prose.
Barbara Tuchman
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain
Don't say the old lady screamed -- Bring her on and let her scream.
Mark Twain
I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.
Mark Twain
Truth is stranger than Fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar (1897)
We can still put truth in men's heads.
John Updike quoted in NYT - Henry Bech, Questions of Character: There's No Ego as Wounded as a Wounded Alter Ego, NYT, March 1, 1999
I try to instantly set in motion a certain forward tilt of suspense or curiosity, and at the end of the story, rectify the tilt, to complete the motion.
John Updike - Paris Review Interview
To hold a pen is to be at war.
Voltaire
I write only because I cannot stop.
Heinrich von Kleist - 1777-1811 German Writer - An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist, ed Phillip B Miller
There were creative writing teachers long before there were creative writing courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists, NYT, May 24, 1999.
I paraphrase Aristotle: If you want to be comical, write about people to whom the audience can feel superior; if you want to be tragical, write about at least one person to whom the audience is bound to feel inferior, and no fair having human problems solved by dumb luck or heavenly intervention.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists, NYT, May 24, 1999.
When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - Kurt Vonnegut: In His Own Words" (London) Times Online (12 April 2007).
There comes a moment in the day, when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes the hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex.
H. G. Wells
In a longish life as a professional writer, I have heard a thousand masterpieces talked out over bars, restaurant tables and love seats. I have never seen one of them in print. Books must be written, not talked.
Morris L. West
With the passing of years I know that the fate of books is not unlike that of human beings: some bring joy, others anguish. Yet one must resist the urge to throw away pen and paper. After all, authentic writers write even if there is little chance for them to be published; they write because they cannot do otherwise, like Kafka's messenger who is privy to a terrible and imperious truth that no one is willing to receive but is nonetheless compelled to go on.
Elie Wiesel - A Sacred Magic Can Elevate the Secular Storyteller, NYT, June 19, 2000
Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories.
Elie Wiesel - A Sacred Magic Can Elevate the Secular Storyteller, NYT, June 19, 2000
A kiss that speaks volumes is seldom a first edition.
Clare Whiting
My work is emotionally autobiographical. It has no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life. I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing. When you're going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or some other disorder in your life, then you have no refuge but writing.
Tennessee Williams
A lot of writing is an acquired schizophrenia. You have to really allow yourself to be a kind of egomaniac when you first start a story or a piece of work. Everything you write has to seem good to you and just get it out. Let it inspire you to the next sentence and the next scene and the next character. And in that way, you discover what your story is. But if you're looking over your own shoulder all the time, crossing every other sentence out, and holding every other word up to the light as you're composing, that can lead you to become kind of constipated as a writer. Later on, you have to look at your work with a very cold eye, as if you were editing someone else's. But in that first blush, why not enjoy it?
Tobias Wolff
After a while you begin to understand that writing well is not a promised reward for being virtuous. No, every time you do it you’re stepping off into darkness and hoping for some light.
Tobias Wolff - Interview in the Paris Review
Writing’s hard. You’ll take any out, if you can. I work best away from the house because I’m too tempted to check for calls and my mail and deal with tradesmen and run an errand, go out for lunch.
Tobias Wolff - Interview in the Paris Review
Writers need to remember that once the book leaves their hands, it’s not theirs anymore. It belongs to its readers, and its readers will make of it what they will. Sometimes I get letters from students—We’re reading this story in my class, and everybody says it means the narrator wants to be a girl, but I think it means he wants to join the circus. What does it really mean? I politely decline to answer, because after all the writer doesn’t own the last word, and may actually have an incomplete understanding of a given piece.
Tobias Wolff - Interview in the Paris Review
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia Woolf
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
William Wordsworth
All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.
William Wordsworth
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard
Writing 1 - Quotes
http://www.nsrider.com/quotes/writing2.htm
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