280 Quotes About On-writing

When I'm writing, really writing, everything but breathing is an ignorable distraction.

On Writing About Nora HawksI write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women.

The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying—it was as if I’d never written anything before them in my life. All my old tricks seemed to have deserted me. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones. There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.

Focus on writing first.

Words are funny things - They are free until you use them.

Everybody dies. Some die still waiting for inspiration.

Why one goes on writing when one sees what writing can be - and what one's own writing is not. Aldous Huxley

All deeply good characters in imaginative literature, have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they comprehensible by readers and expressible by writers. Aldous Huxley

Pay attention, and use your imagination.