1,068 Quotes About Writers-on-writing

The study of philosophy represents an extended mediation on death. The study of literature teaches us that life is absurd, because humankind possesses the foreknowledge that we each owe a death. It is the poets, persons vested with divine inspiration, whom teach us how to live, by boldly experiencing and dutifully recording all the vibrant sensations of life.

There are times when I'm writing where time feels irrelevant. Those are the moments I know I'm creating magic.

In the novel All Flesh Is Grass, one of Cliff’s characters, Nancy, who was a writer herself, would say of that profession: “It’s a thing you don’t talk about—not until you’re well along with it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don’t want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start.

Distraction is reading written word and when I seek to make distraction I write the words I wish to be enveloped in.

I wish I knew where they came from. The ideas. They are always so random. A marriage of one thing meeting another, creating some weird looking baby that needs to grow into a better self.

Write your story before it dies one single breath at time. Nobody cares if it is the truth as long as it really happened.

Don't worry about offending people. Any time you write something thought provoking, some idiots will complain, because they hate it when you make them think.

Books used to be written by humanity's greatest thinkers, or at least our greatest entertainers. Now every halfwit can publish his verbal diarrhea. And millions of shitty, mediocre, uninspired, trite books are drowning out mankind's greatest literary accomplishments.

My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character." -- William H. Gass, "Finding a Form