Quotes on “writing”

What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.

If you want to be a writer-stop talking about it and sit down and write!

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons.

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.

Write what should not be forgotten.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?

A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.

The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't.