Aug 18 2008
Quotes by Writers on Writing
I once read something Ernest Hemingway said about writing: “The most essential gift for a good writer,” he claimed, “is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.”
The statement hit me like a bullet and has stayed with me ever since. When I’m not completely sincere in my writing, when I’m not keeping it “real,” when I’m not writing as well as I should be just to get it done, Hemingway’s words come back to haunt me and make me vow to do better.
Another quote from a writer has comforted me I don’t know how many times as I struggled to get writing projects off the ground: “Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at the blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” – Gene Fowler
Granted, what Fowler said doesn’t help much in terms of offering a solution, but isn’t it comforting to know you’re not the only one with this problem? (I should mention here that a few years ago I figured out a way to avoid the problem, or at least mitigate it, with a step-by-step pre-writing process that really does work for me, and apparently for others I’ve taught.)
But I digress. Back to writers’ quotes about writing. Beyond the two I just mentioned, here are a few others that are well worth reading:
“Less is more.” – Robert Browning
“If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.” – Epictetus
“I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn’t. Nobody can write the absolute truth.” – Henry Miller
“I have only made this letter long because I have not had time to make it shorter.” – Blaise Pascal
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” – Henry David Thoreau
“(Writing) – the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” – Mary Heaton Vorse
“Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.” – Logan Pearsall Smith
“Never believe anything a writer tell you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.” – Laurence Sterne
“Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.” – William Wordsworth
“Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.” – Aldous Huxley
That Pascal quotation has long been one of my favorites! Here’s another one that resonates:
“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one real person you know, or an imagined person, and write to that one.”
—John Steinbeck
In my writing classes, I suggest the author-to-be picture herself sitting at a table with that person, having coffee and telling him or her about this exciting new topic on which they will be writing a book.
Great quotes. One particularly impresses me. Less is more. I wish I could be as brief as my writing should be!