Writing Quotes - Page 589

In history, one gathers clues like a detective, tries to present an honest account of what most likely happened, and writes a narrative according to what we know and, where we aren't absolutely sure, what might be most likely to have happened, within the generally accepted rules of evidence and sources.

Other people write about the bling and the booty. I write about the pus and the gnats. To me, that's beautiful.

Teaching English and teaching Writing are two separate things.

If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.

Great writing can be done in biography, history, art.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.

A story rises from the springs of creation, from the pure will to be; it tells itself; I takes its own course, finds its own way, its own words; and the writer's job is to be its medium.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

What's needed in this case is conscious and serious practice in hearing, and using, and being used by, other people's voices.

Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.

There was one person who greatly and directly benefited my career--my agent Virginia Kidd. From 1968 to the late nineties she represented all my work, in every field except poetry. I could send her an utterly indescribable story, and she'd sell it to Playboy or the Harvard Law Review or Weird Tales or The New Yorker--she knew where to take it. She never told me what to write or not write, she never told me, That won't sell, and she never meddled with my prose.

An author must learn the principles of good storytelling only in order to write better from the heart.

I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

I write what I write.

[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.

I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text.

A writer writes for writers, a non-writer writes for his next-door neighbor or for the manager of the local bank branch, and he fears (often mistakenly) that they would not understand or, in any case, would not forgive his boldness.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.

I am a professor who writes novels on Sundays

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

Developing projects of my own and producing and writing and directing is something that's very interesting to me, but you know, one step at a time and you've got to establish yourself on one side before you really have the power to do something else. That's always the immediate goal.