Writers Quotes - Page 5

Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

I do not believe that I should only write about what I know but that I should write also of the other.

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

A book, a true book, is the writer's confessional. For, whether he would have it so or not, he is betrayed, directly or indirectly, by his characters, into presenting publicly his innermost feelings.

I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months…Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

Rich will be my life if I
can keep my memories full
and brimming, and record
them on clear-eyed
mornings while I set
joyously to work setting
pen to holy craft.

If you are a real writer, then just surrender to the writer's life, all of it, even the bad stuff. When you do that, the beauty appears: the peace, the meaning, the joy, the fulfillment, the sense that you are doing what you were born to do and what could be better, in the end, than that?

Writers are archeologists of themselves.

Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We’ve got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

I write to believe in goodness.

Be passionate about what you write, believe in your ability to convey timeless ideas, and let no one tell you what what you're capable of.

Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman's erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.