Emil Cioran Quotes

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Writing every book is like a purge; at the end of it one is empty ... like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.

Don't be 'a writer'. Be writing.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

Writing a book is like masturbation, and making a movie is like an orgy.

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.

Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it's done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

I think that it's worthwhile to explore the ways in which you write the person that's writing your plays as opposed to simply assuming that it's all a natural process and there's no design in it. Because your public persona is designed, to a certain extent, and you can have fun and profit at various times doing that.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

I never enjoyed writing a book more; indeed, it is the only one I remember in no sense as a labor but as a joy.

Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.

Am I allowed to ask my book / whether it's true I wrote it?

I'm not the first person to have said this - no writer ever feels that the execution of a book lives up to the idea for that book. The execution always falls short.