Quotes about writing
writing poet novel
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. Alice Walker
writing people feelings
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.
writing should-have want
I write not only what I want to read...I write all the things I should have been able to read.
writing kind bones
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 sides jazz
There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.
writing interesting violence
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence - as it saves most writers who live in 'interesting' oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity.
writing thinking muse
I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.
writing hatred littles
I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.
writing violence sin
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
writing people understanding
Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.
writing thinking long
I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame.
writing stories
The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me. Alice McDermott
writing order fiction
When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.
writing reflection thinking
I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of isolation and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations. Alice James
writing crafts want
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing. Alice Munro
writing one-day towns
I knew I would be famous one day. That's because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same things I did, like writing.
writing mean men
Naturally my stories are about women - I'm a woman. I don't know what the term is for men who write mostly about men. I'm not always sure what is meant by "feminist." In the beginning I used to say, well, of course I'm a feminist. But if it means that I follow a kind of feminist theory, or know anything about it, then I'm not. I think I'm a feminist as far as thinking that the experience of women is important. That is really the basis of feminism.
writing important alive
It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
writing thinking somewhere-else
If I decided to send this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It's too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don't know where that is, is worse.
writing enjoy hard
Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets.
writing years practice
For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,
writing people anecdotes
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
writing thinking people
It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, "Read," but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, "Don't read, don't think, just write," and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think, "There must be something else people do," you won't be able to quit.
writing bridges play
I can't play bridge. I don't play tennis. All those things that people learn, and I admire, there hasn't seemed time for. But what there is time for is looking out the window.
writing trying want
There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don't feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered into that.
writing different novelists
I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist Alice Hoffman
writing want language
I don't really read as much as I used to. A lot of what I was looking for as an escape I find in writing. And the other thing is that I don't want to get into someone else's language when I'm working
writing use faster
I'm much faster now. When you only have a certain amount of time to write, after a while you learn to use your time well or you stop writing
writing novel knows
No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written
writing wind light
writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind. Alice Childress
writing good-day bad-day
I have my good days and my bad days, but I don't have as much energy as I used to back when I was young and foolish and didn't count the cost - and it takes a lot - to write Anne McCaffrey
writing verbs limits
James Blish told me I had the worst case of "said bookism" (that is, using every word except said to indicate dialogue). He told me to limit the verbs to said, replied, asked, and answered and only when absolutely necessary.
writing tools emotion
I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage