Quotes Tagged "writing"

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

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

Poems are never finished - just abandoned

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.

If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.' [Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]

What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

The story is always better than your ability to write it.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.