writing quotes

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

‚The New Yorker‘ was really my first experience with serious editing. Previously, I’d more or less just had copyediting with a few suggestions – not much.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

Writing means sharing. It’s part of the human condition to want to share things – thoughts, ideas, opinions.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

Language is the dress of thought.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

When I worked on a magazine, I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‚i’s‘ small.

Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

And one more thing.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

That’s something that is almost accidental at the beginning of a career, but the more you write, the more trained you are to recognize the little signals.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever – was write novels.

I started writing as a child. But I didn’t think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something – no, maybe junior – and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

I cry very easily. It can be a movie, a phone conversation, a sunset – tears are words waiting to be written.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

As a country, we can’t teach kids how to read and write when we got 18 years to do it. And that’s – that’s a disgrace.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

If you’re nice to me I’ll never write anything bad about you.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.