When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.
on writing
from Writing As Reading by Susan Sontag
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer. And, long after you’ve become a writer, reading books others write–and rereading the beloved books of the past–constitutes an irresistible distraction from writing. Distraction. Consolation. Torment. And yes, inspiration.
Raymond Carver on writing
“That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.”
Edward Albee on writing
Interviewer: You have said that it is through the actual process of writing that you eventually come to know the theme of your play. Sometimes you’ve admitted that even when you have finished a play you don’t have any specific idea about its theme. What about that?
Albee: Naturally, no writer who’s any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about. But at the same time, writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about. To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind–in my case at any rate–without my knowing it, before I sit down to write. So in that sense, I suppose, writing a play is finding out what the play is. I always find that the better answer to give. It’s a question I despise, and it always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question which I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy–the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself. If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully, it can evaporate and vanish. It’s not only terribly difficult to talk about, it’s dangerous. You know the old story about the–I think it’s one of Aesop’s Fables, or perhaps not, or a Chinese story–about the very clever animal that saw a centipede that he didn’t like. He said, “My God, it’s amazing and marvelous how you walk with all those hundreds and thousands of legs. How do you do it? How do you get them all moving that way?” The centipede stopped and thought and said, “Well,I take the left front leg and then I–” and he thought about it for a while, and he couldn’t walk.
Tennessee Williams on Young Writers
“If they’re meant to be writers, they will write. There’s nothing that can stop them. It may kill them. They may not be able to stand the terrible indignities, humiliations, privations, shocks that attend the life of an American writer. They may not. Yet they may have some sense of humor about it, and manage to survive.”
Eugene Ionesco on writing
“Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers I’d be a politician.”
on writing by John Updike
“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little east of Kansas. I think of books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teen-aged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”
on writing by Erica Jong
“Writing is one of the few professions left where you take all the responsibility for what you do. It’s really dangerous and ultimately destroys you as a writer if you start thinking about responses to your work or what your audience needs.”
Ernest Hemingway on writing
“A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes, but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found out what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes a part of the experience of the person who reads it.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald on writing
“Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves–that’s the truth. We have two or three moving experiences in our lives–experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.”
Leonard Durso 