Literary Creation Quotes

Writing a short story is a little like walking into a dark room, finding a light and turning it on. The light is the end of the story.

writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences - experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.

National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule.

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

A reader can never tell if it's a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you're reading it, they're the same. It's a thimble. It's in the book.

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

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.

Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.

Fiction is always really a labor.

Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.

In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

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.

Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.

But writers INVITE ghosts, maybe; along with actors and artists, they are the only totally accepted mediums of our society. They make worlds that never were, populate them with people who never existed, and then invite us to join them in their fantasies. And we do it, don't we? Yes. We PAY to do it.

Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

It has no meaning, what do you use to write, the only thing that is important is: what do you write. A machine to write a book instead of a writer is not invented yet, and probably will never be.

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

Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.

One of the easiest things in the world is not to write... If it were easy, everyone would do it.

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.