Quotes about writing

Life is boring. I have experiences now only when I am writing.

The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.

Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.

Do not be too quick to judge the makers of worlds. Will you ever write a story for which no character will have caused to reproach you?

But, at the moment, the urge to write was not upon him. He shook his head and grimaced wryly. As a veteran newspaper man, he knew you wrote when you had to write, not when the Muse sprinkled fairy dust in your hair and tapped you with a magic wand.

Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist -- all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

She no longer believes very strongly in belief... Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.

I would rather be the author of my story than have lies told about me.

To tell the truth in all its substance you must have quiet and a comfortable chair away from all distraction, and a window to stare through and then the knack of seeing waves when there are fields before your eyes…

I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.

​So far as I could make out, what writers did couldn't even be classified as work.