Quotes about writ
writing mystery appeals
The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery. Joyce Carol Oates
writing grandmother typewriters
When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.
writing lucky ifs
You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.
writing opportunity stories
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
writing voice emotion
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
writing materials knows
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
writing imagination routine
The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.
writing thoughtful preparation
When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.
writing scientist metaphorical
If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
writing different pseudonyms
It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either.
writing hard
It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
writing people periods
Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.
writing lost has-beens
One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.
writing world violence
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
writing crafts austerity
On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
writing different impossible
It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.
writing men class
while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.
writing ironic moral
"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.
writing perspective political
It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.
writing
Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.
writing
Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.
writing soul cards
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
writing finals firsts
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
writing apology want
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
writing my-family
I do a lot of writing about my family. Katey Sagal
writing terrible-times finished
Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more. Kate Atkinson
writing would-be wonderful
Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.
writing names clothes
When I'm writing, my neural pathways get blocked. I can't read. I can barely hold a conversation without forgetting words and names. I wish I could wear the same clothes and eat the same food each day.
writing people different
Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'
writing would-be stories
I can't imagine what it would be like to write in a relaxed state. I'm going to be writing some stories for my own interest. I want to experiment with different things and see if I can approach writing with much less control and in a better psychological state. It will be like breaking out of a straitjacket.
writing ties life-is
The great thing about writing compared to life is getting to tie things up.
writing firsts said
Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?
writing museums awards
I had a novel in the back of my mind when I won an Ian St James story competition in 1993. At the award ceremony an agent asked me if I was writing a novel. I showed her four or five chapters of what would become 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' and to my surprise she auctioned them off.