writing quotes

The kind of fiction I’m trying to write is about telling the truth.

There is good and mediocre writing within every genre.

It’s pretty intense writing about my own life, my own struggles.

There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.

There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed. They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

I didn’t have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

Some of our earliest writing, in cuneiform, was about who owes what.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.

It’s true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.

There’s a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That’s what writers do when they’re good.

When I am writing, I do not distinguish between the natural and supernatural. Everything seems real. That is my world, you could say.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

I’m writing an unauthorized autobiography.

I am never going to have anything more to do with politics or politicians. When this war is over I shall confine myself entirely to writing and painting.

It usually helps me write by reading – somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

It would be an egregious mistake to ever refer to me in the same breath as most of the people I write about.

Writing is like anything else – the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you’ll be about what’s going to happen to it, where it’s going, what it sounds like, whether it’s right.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

You fail only if you stop writing.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday’s dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.