Writers on Writing

Literature vs. Journalism

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly (1903–1974), British critic

Literature is news that STAYS news.
Ezra Pound (1885–1972), U.S. poet, critic.

 
Language

Language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
Octavio Paz (b. 1914), Mexican poet.

 
Novels

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.
Salman Rushdie (b. 1947), Indian–born British author.

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.
Norman Mailer (b. 1923), U.S. author

Writing fiction is ... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1965), U.S. author. Old Hometown, ch. 1 (1935).

In addition to writing books of her own, Lane helped her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957), develop her famous series of autobiographical “Little House” books for children.

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.
Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), U.S. fiction writer and essayist.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest Hemingway
 

Writing poetry

Writing is like this—you dredge for the poem’s meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.
Paul Engle

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis (1878–1937), U.S. humorist, journalist.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost (1874-1963), U.S. poet.

 
Good writing…

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), U.S. author.

Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go, and is only right admirable when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), U.S. philosopher, poet, essayist

Revision

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.
Elie Wiesel (b. 1928), Rumanian–born U.S. writer.
 

The Writing Life

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
Catherine Drinker Bowen

Literature is my legal wife and medicine my mistress. When I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904), Russian author, playwright

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), U.S. author.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
Alice Walker (b. 1944), U.S. author, critic.

Writing is a dreadful Labour, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Scottish essayist, historian.

Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money.
J.P. (James Patrick) Donleavy (b. 1926), Irish–American novelist.