Quotes about Writing

Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.

The person who writes the bank's commercials is not the person who makes the loans.

I tend to write about my anxieties - it's what I'm afraid will happen. And I write a story working it out.

Writing is like anything else - the more you do it, the better you get at it, the easier it comes, and the less concerned you'll be about what's going to happen to it, where it's going, what it sounds like, whether it's right.

I have to know the killer, the victim and the motive when I begin. Then I start to create the characters and see how the novel takes shape based on what these people are like.

Now and then when I am writing, I automatically do a small drawing, such as I sent you lately. I did one this morning representing Elijah in the desert under an orange sky, with some hawthorns in the foreground. It is nothing special, but I see it all so clearly before me, and I think that at such moments I could speak about it enthusiastically - may it be given me to do so later on.

I am writing to Russell at the same time. I think we know, don't we, that the English, the Yankees, have this much in common with the Dutch, that their charity…is very Christian. Now, the rest of us not being very good Christians…That's what I can't put out of my head writing again like this.

If I were living near you, I should try to make you understand that it might perhaps be more practical for you to paint with me than to write, and that you might be able to express your feelings more easily that way. In any case I can do something personally about your painting, but I am not in the writing profession.

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats—and one always secretes too much jelly.

When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.

Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective.