Literature Writing Quotes

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul ~ Albert Camus

The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world. ~ Etgar Keret

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile. It looks beautiful, but soulless. So I warn them that, often in writing programs, articulation and clarity are more important than what you actually say . . . And you say, "It's so well-written, but who gives a fuck?" For certain, the guy who wrote it doesn't give a fuck. It's not something that has to do with his life; it's just something well-written and illuminating, and writing is not about that. The best stories you usually hear are stories that people feel some type of urgency about . . .

Nobody else in the world would look at writing as craftsmanship - it's totally this Protestant hardworking ethic. You go into this kind of infinite space of imagination and you fence yourself in with all kinds of laws. Why do we have to keep playing this strange game? ~ Etgar Keret

Literature has always been related to utopia, so when the utopia loses meaning, so does literature. What I was trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do-- what on earth do I know?-- was to combat fiction with fiction. What I ought to do was affirm what existed, affirm the state of things as they are, in other words, revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out, for in that way I could undoubtedly have a better life, but I couldn't do it, I couldn't, something had congealed inside me, a conviction was rooted inside me, and although it was essentialist, that is, outmoded and, furthermore, romantic, I could not get past it, for the simple reason that it had not only been thought but also experienced, in these sudden states of clear-sightedness that everyone must know, where for a few seconds you catch sight of another world from the one you were in only a moment earlier, where the world seems to step forward and show itself for a brief glimpse before reverting and leaving everything as before... ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer. ~ Roberto Bolano

I think that I had better go, Holmes."
"Not a bit, doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. ~ Tom Waits

I start writing when I overcome my disgust with literature. ~ Danilo Kis

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control. ~ Robert Bringhurst

If a bloke gave you a hundred quid for a book you can bet your life it's his way, but if all the poor and suffering people raise their hats to you for writing it - that's different; it makes it worthwhile then. ~ Alan Marshall

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward. ~ Paul Kalanithi

Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it. ~ Witold Gombrowicz

I won't stop writing until I am known as the Kurt Cobain of literature! ~ Christina Westover

This is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity ... You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I do feel that literature should be demystified. What I object to is what is happening in our era: literature is only something you get at school as an assignment. No one reads for fun, or to be subversive or to get turned on to something. It's just like doing math at school. I mean, how often do we sit down and do trigonometry for fun, to relax. I've thought about this, the domination of the literary arts by theory over the past 25 years -- which I detest -- and it's as if you have to be a critic to mediate between the author and the reader and that's utter crap. Literature can be great in all ways, but it's just entertainment like rock'n'roll or a film. It is entertainment. If it doesn't capture you on that level, as entertainment, movement of plot, then it doesn't work. Nothing else will come out of it. The beauty of the language, the characterisation, the structure, all that's irrelevant if you're not getting the reader on that level -- moving a story. If that's friendly to readers, I cop to it. ~ T. Coraghessan Boyle

The best kind of writing is that which comes from the authors soul. ~ Ndiritu Wahome

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality. ~ Zbigniew Herbert

To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil. ~ David Shields

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature. ~ Andre Gide

Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example ~ Robert Lane Greene

I think literature totally fails when it has an agenda. - From an interview on the podcast Starship Sofa, December 2010. ~ Connie Willis

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write? ~ Gao Xingjian

No doubts our generation is producing another form of grub street literature.. Welcome to the world of hack writers.. ~ Himmilicious

It is not enough for the hand to touch a book and turn its pages. The pages of a book must touch the heart. ~ Jennifer Spredemann

Literature was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches - nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low calorie despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed.
The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.
speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1962 ~ John Steinbeck

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature. ~ James Frey

The most difficult achievement is the capacity to see oneself, to name oneself, to imagine oneself. If in daily life we use ideologies, common sense, religion, even literature itself to disguise our experiences and make them presentable, in fiction it's possible to sweep away all the veils - in fact, perhaps, it's a duty. ~ Elena Ferrante

Fiction though it is a fiction, should be written in a way that it feels like a reality, a reality every reader willingly or sometimes unwillingly goes through, until the reader finishes reading and sometimes even after that. ~ Arti Honrao

There is a part of everything which is unexplored,
because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown. ~ Guy De Maupassant

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn't. ~ David Shields

It seemed like writers have the most important job in the world, to make books, to create a connection, a kind of telepathy between two minds in which one can inhabit the other. ~ Mikel Jollett

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again. ~ Ruth Ozeki

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial ... a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer. ~ James Kisner

Current "literature" [is] well-written books in which disgusting people do disgusting things to other disgusting people for no apparent reason and with no apparent resolution. ~ Roberta Gellis

Written words, if carefully laid down, represent the civilized ideal of reason. ~ Brian Herbert

In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes. ~ Dan Simmons

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature. ~ Susan Sontag

By the age of nine, I had a thorough knowledge of contemporary Polish literature as well as of foreign literature in Polish translation, and I began to write poems in honour of a lady of thirty years. Naturally, she knew nothing about them. ~ Wladyslaw Reymont

Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time. ~ Howard Nemerov

In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and - SNAP - the job's a game! ~ Julie Andrews Edwards

I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child. ~ Katherine Paterson

There is only one story. ~ Thomas C. Foster

But whatever the exact psychology of the process {receiving recognition or literary success}, the present has a way of contaminating the past. And the writing will change accordingly. Turmoil and dilemma once experienced with a certain desperation may be seen more complacently as the writer reflects that through expressing them he has realized his inevitable and well-deserved triumph. The lean years of patient toil when no one paid attention may even begin to seem preferable to the present. The very thing you created in the heat of fierce concentration has destroyed the circumstances that made it possible. The writer is devoured along with his books. ~ Tim Parks

When you've got a thing to say,
Say it! Don't take half a day.
When your tale's got little in it
Crowd the whole thing in a minute!
Life is short
a fleeting vapor
Don't you fill the whole blamed paper
With a tale which, at a pinch,
Could be cornered in an inch!
Boil her down until she simmers,
Polish her until she glimmers. ~ Joel Chandler Harris

Listening to music, reading literature, writing, and extended periods of personal introspection provide four prongs of the incitements available to form a conscious and subconscious designation of self. Other potential incentives that contribute to self-identity include religion and cultural events as well as painting, sculpture, dance, films, newspapers, television, Internet surfing, web sites, and online message boards. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving ... The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. ~ David Foster Wallace

Language is a finding-place not a hiding place. ~ Jeanette Winterson

A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. ~ Philip Zaleski

If I read something somebody wrote 300 years ago, and it's me, what I'm going through now in my head, it sends chills down my spine, and I feel like that's what I want to be able to offer - that if I offer myself, there's a chance somebody else will feel connected. ~ Charlie Kaufman

Literature is the ditch I'm going to die in. It's still the thing I care most about. ~ Thomas McGuane

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. ~ Joan Didion

No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature. ~ Edward Hirsch

You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity. ~ Jay McInerney

Scholarly acumen sharpens taste and judgment, but we must never mistake criticism for art. Intellectual analysis, however heady, will not nourish the soul. ~ Robert McKee

Snow floated down every once in a while, but it was frail snow, like a memory fading into the distance. ~ Haruki Murakami

Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies. ~ Roberto Bolano

The life of your body may be sustained by daily bread and rice, but the life of your soul may only be sustained by the fruit of wisdom. ~ Subhan Zein

In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy, and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame ... ~ Matthew Gregory Lewis

What you read when you don't have to ... ~ Oscar Wilde

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent. ~ Nelson Algren

I seek to take my audience on an emotional roller-coaster ride, a journey of laughter and tears and every sentiment in between. ~ Marc Royston

There are no inferior types of fiction, only inferior practitioners
of them ~ David Morrell

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I love drawing on lead. Romans used to curse each other with sheets of it. My slave would come slide the sheet under your door with a curse on it. They had amazing writing and drawings on them, and they survive to this day since lead is so stable. ~ Shea Hembrey

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds. ~ G.H. Hardy

If I'm at home on my own and the writing isn't going well, I clean my house. And there have been times in the past few years when my house has looked really clean. ~ Peter Mullan

I'm just very sort of compulsive and lack the ability to keep things in perspective. If I'm not writing or playing guitar or on the microphone or out on the road, I'm cleaning pots and pans or freaking out about some plumbing issue or tweeting. ~ Marc Maron

A word garden blooming within the tangled weeds. ~ Jazz Feylynn

The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together. ~ Gyorgy Ligeti

I write about things that scare me. I've never written a snake story in my life. I myself have never written a story about snakes because they don't scare me. I write about rats because they scare the hell out of me. ~ Stephen King

A first-rate story is easily killed by second-rate design. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In good writing, the contemplative and the exciting happen at the same time. ~ Dave Morris

Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time. ~ Sloane Crosley

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer. ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Music teaches us about lyricism in writing, a delicate turn of phrase, selectiveness with words, rhythmic passages. Most of all, music, like good writing, touches our emotions with cadences that slip in like a subtle visitor, familiar and known before. ~ Suzy Davies

When I'm writing there's nobody watching me. Today, it's hard to find a profession where you're not being watched! ~ Ruskin Bond

My writing life is always a bit disorganized. It's hard for me to get going, but sometimes, once I begin, I go like the wind. ~ Sue Miller

I hoped at first to find a rather more direct comprehension of life in one or two novelists and poets; but if they really had such a comprehension, it must be confessed they did not show it; most of them, I thought, did not really live - contented themselves with appearing to live, and were on the verge of considering life merely as a vexatious hindrance to writing. ~ Andre Gide

There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family. ~ William Nicholson

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable. ~ Francis Bacon

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters. ~ Brenda Ueland

The presidency of the United Nations was not thrust upon me overnight. I had to grow up to the measurements it demanded of a proponent of peace. This was done session by session, step by step. It entailed trips halfway around the world, again and again. It demanded nights without sleep, studying, writing, poring over documents; days without rest; and always the curb on the temper and the willingness to give and to receive. ~ Carlos P. Romulo

There are some works which the authors must consign unpublished to posterity, however uncertain be the event, however hopeless be the trust. He that writes the history of his own times, if he adhere steadily to truth, will write that which his own times will not easily endure. He must be content to reposite his book till all private passions shall cease, and love and hatred give way to curiosity. ~ Samuel Johnson

Every writer has to figure out what works best - and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits. ~ Nora Roberts

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation. ~ Ray Bradbury

All the details of the life and the quirks and the friendships can be laid out for us, but the mystery of the writing will remain. No amount of documentation, however fascinating, can take us there. ~ V.S. Naipaul

When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don't know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you're doing and this state ... I would say that it's related to daydreaming. When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I'm unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes. ~ John Hersey

I tell my staff, we're riding a tour bus around, and we're going to stop and look at some weird stuff - but we're taking our viewers around safely. They're just looking out the window at it. I'm trying to create a sense of comfort for my center audience. ~ Chris Matthews

Literature, like nobility, runs in the blood. ~ William Hazlitt

I've always thought that science and fiction writing have a lot in common because they're both about modeling reality. ~ Scott Westerfeld

Some people consider the way Shakespeare was writing about Ophelia as erotomania-that she was delusional in thinking that Hamlet was in love with her. But I don't think so. ~ Jack White

Winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don't need to care about science, literature or peace. ~ Stephen Colbert

I've had situations when I've actually encouraged authors to self-publish because their book was poor. Now one would conclude that I'm asking them to self-publish because their book was poor and the self-publishing warehouse is where all the poor books belong. But no, it's because "poor" is only my opinion, and I'm just one in millions of readers. ~ King Samuel Benson

Write to Please Yourself. When You write to Please Others You end up Pleasing No one. ~ Benjamin Franklin