Lew Wallace Quotes

I've been writing since I was six years old. It's hard to imagine stopping. I would hate to think that I've already written my best book.

I work even when I am on vacation. You know that line by Stéphane Mallarmé, "All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book"? I am the kind of person who finds life interesting only if it is translated into writing, if it is parsed into words.

Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing.... 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.

I love writing. I'm not particularly comfortable in the actual world - I'm much more comfortable on the page. So if I could have a life where I could just slip the pages under the door and somebody would slip me a meal back, then that would be perfect for me.

The further you go in writing the more alone you are.

When I sit down to write, which is the essential moment in my life, I am completely alone. Whenever I write a book, I accumulate a lot of documentation. That background material is the most intimate part of my private life. It's a little embarrassing - like being seen in your underwear It's like the way magicians never tell others how they make a dove come out of a hat.

a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

Writing a book is a bit like going on location for a movie. You're absent from your life, your family, and your friends. You're psychologically gone, so you might as well be physically gone.

I feel like one can have all of that as a writer; you're writing, you're reading, you're talking to interesting and intelligent people. Your life is structured around whatever book you're writing, and so is your reading and so are many of your conversations.

You have to remember that writing itself is so solitary. You start writing because you're lonely.

When you write, you're alone in a room. And when someone reads a book, they're alone in a room, too, usually. It's a really intimate exchange. And so people ask me where I get the boldness to talk about this or that, but I didn't feel like it required any sort of courage, because I was alone. Sometimes it feels weird for people to read it.

A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.

I was sick all the time, one exotic illness after another, which lasted throughout my twenties. My worst decade. But from the day the first book was accepted, I never got sick again. Writing changed my life.

If you really want a prize, or if you really want applause, you should try to write as many books as humanly possible.

A lot of being a writer doesn't have anything to do with writing. It's ironic - I have to squeeze the books in, even though that's what it's all about.

Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say

I do love writing but it is a lonely profession. You're lonely and optimistic at the same time.

I think the first thing - if you want to be a writer - the first thing you need to do is write. Which sounds like an obvious piece of advice. But so many people have this feeling they want to be a writer and they love to read but they don't actually write very much. The main part of being a writer, though, is being profoundly alone for hours on end, uninterrupted by email or friends or children or romantic partners and really sinking into the work and writing. That's how I write. That's how writing gets done.

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.

We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.

I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.

I am beguiled by your physical beauty, and I am moved by how head-over-heels in love with books you are. And nowhere else have I found such thoughtful and literate reportage on the state of the American soul, as that soul makes itself known in the books we write.

The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.