Writers on writing

Something for the screenwriters:

I handed in a script last year and the studio didn't change one word. The word they didn't change was on page 87.

- Steve Martin, introducing the Best Adapted Screenplay category at the 2003 Oscars​

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

—19th century poet and editor Charles Peguy​

I love reading these. Thanks, Garamet

HAHA!!!!!!!!!!!

It's too true in my case. Many a word (and sentence) of mine on this very board has come into existence because I couldn't spell something.

James Thurber: “With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.”

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.

— Jessamyn West​

Damn right.

I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.

- Cormac McCarthy​

"When men ask me how I know so much about men, they get a simple answer: everything I know about men, I've learned from me."
-- Anton Chekhov

Madeleine L’Engle: “I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children’s books ask questions, and make the readers ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone’s universe.”

“A blank page is God’s way of showing you how hard it is to be God.”

- Anonymous​

Oooo, I'm adding that one to my sig . . .

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

- James A. Michener​

I am a drinker with writing problems.

— Brendan Behan​

When rewriting, move quickly. It’s a little like cutting your own hair.

—Robert Stone​

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

- D.H. Lawrence​

For my Fan Club (you know who you are):


A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

- Tony Hillerman​

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

- Alexander Pope​

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now . . . Some more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

- Annie Dillard​

One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.

- Tobias Wolff​

For several days I'd been going around with this sentence in my head: "He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang." I knew a story was there and that it wanted telling. I felt it in my bones, that a story belonged with that beginning, if I could just have the time to write it. I found the time, an entire day - twelve, fifteen hours even - if I wanted to make use of it. I did, and I sat down in the morning and wrote the first sentence, and other sentences promptly began to attach themselves. I made the story just as I'd make a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, the one I'd been wanting to write.

- Raymond Carver​

Frederick Locker-Lampson: “I believe that nothing completely satisfies an imaginative writer but copious and continuous draughts of unmitigated praise, always provided it is accompanied by a large and increasing sale of his works.”

Perhaps you will say that in this classification of citizens I have marked no place for myself; that I am neither farmer, manufacturer, mechanic, merchant, nor shopkeeper. I believe, however, I am of the first class. I am a Farmer of thoughts, and as all the crops I raise, I give away, I please myself with making you a present of the thoughts in this letter.

-Thomas Paine.
portion of a letter to Henry Laurens.

Plato: “Don’t ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.”

The hardest thing about writing, in a sense, is not writing. I mean, the sentence is not designed to show you off, you know. It's not supposed to be "Look at me!" "Look, no hands!" It's supposed to be a pipeline between the reader and you. One condition of the sentence is to write so well that no one notices that you're writing.

- James Baldwin​

"A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit. Everything else-- just tear that motherfucker apart."
Richard Price

I could not possibly disagree more with that one.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. ~Anton Chekhov

Never mistake motion for action.

- Ernest Hemingway​

John D. MacDonald: “If you would be thrilled by watching the galloping advance of a major glacier, you’d be ecstatic watching changes in publishing.”