Quotes on “writing”

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

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

Never put off writing until you are better at it.

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale..

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

All I need is a sheet of paperand something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.