1,322 quotes found
“Es kommt nicht darauf an, wie eine Geschichte anfängt. Auch nicht darauf, wie sie aufhört. Sondern auf das, was dazwischen passiert.”
“If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.”
“No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.”
“You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.”
“Henry's recollections of the past, in contrast to Proust, are done while in movement. He may remember his first wife while making love to a whore, or he may remember his very first love while walki...”
“When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be co...”
“All the time she writing the world had continued.”
“Sometimes, as much as writing saves one’s own life, you cannot imagine how it will save another’s. This is another reason why it is important to do the work, over and over again. It is food, the ki...”
“Of all human activities, writing is the one for which it is easiest to find excuses not to begin – the desk’s too big, the desk’s too small, there’s too much noise, there’s too much quiet, it’s too...”
“Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.”
“Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.”
“My greatest personal mistake is ever to allow a word or moment that “doesn’t count,” i.e., that I do not refer to my own basic principles. Every word, every action, every moment counts. (This is th...”
“Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.”
“I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do--then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is...”
“He felt as he always did when he finished a book — queerly empty, let down, aware that for each little success he had paid a toll of absurdity.”
“Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.”
“Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making th...”
“What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.”
“Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.”
“The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You kn...”
