Quotes about Writing

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven't the nerve to put them down, but I'd like to, because now when I'm writing it's already tomorrow and I'm afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together

All good novelists have bad memories.

So much of a novelist's writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn't exist - mental concepts.

I had no memory at all of Sarah and I was completely free from anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, hate: my mind was a blank sheet on which somebody had just been on the point of writing a message of happiness. I felt sure that when my memory came back, the writing would continue and that I should be happy.

A book takes me a year to write. It's too hard work for a revenge. -If you knew how little you had to revenge....

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see—every scrap

I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view.

I thought my life was mapped out. Research, living in the forest, teaching and writing. But in '86 I went to a conference and realised the chimpanzees were disappearing. I had worldwide recognition and a gift of communication. I had to use them.

I think that's a part of what motivates me in my teaching and writing. Once the Gospel feels mainstream and becomes a nicely organized, orchestrated belief system, frankly, I don't think there is even an attraction to the human spirit.

The trick to writing an aphorism is to place a period at the point where you're inclined to say, "in other words...."