Tennessee Williams Quotes

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

I have stacks and stacks of journals. I'll change the names if I ever decide to publish them.

I wake up in the morning and my mind starts making sentences, and I have to get rid of them fast - talk them or write them down.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.

When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.

Rarely does a complete idea come to me. I basically start with just a small scene or a snatch of dialogue and force myself to write and to keep writing. Sometimes it becomes a book.

The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

I often write from memory by walking around and talking to myself. Even when I'm working at a computer I write out loud, so that I can hear the poem's rhythm.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish.

Fiction writing feels more honest to me.

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.

If you don't like my book, write your own.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

Writing is the act of discovery.

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

The act of writing means you wish to communicate. Whether you're writing a memoir for yourself you put in a drawer, or you write a poem and you send it to a little magazine, or you write for publication, it always means - the form follows function.

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.