"I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking - which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."
Read quote
3 likes
Writing quotes
Writing
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Writing
Browse quotes that often appear alongside writing — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Writing quotes (page 396 of 1537)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"One of the few ways I can almost be certain I'll understand something is by sitting down and writing about it. Because by forcing yourself to write about it and putting it down in words, you can't avoid having your say on the subject. You might be wrong, but you have to think about it very intensely to write about it."
Read quote
3 likes
"Allen [ Ginsberg] was a particular friend, one of my heroes, really. I knew him almost as long as I've been writing."
Read quote
3 likes
"["Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas"] is a very hard book to translate to film because there's so much interior monologue. The what if factor. I tried to write it cinematically and let the dialogue carry it but I forgot about the interior monologue. It's kind of hard to show what's going on in the head. I think we should do it like a documentary."
Read quote
3 likes
"I couldn't imagine, and I don't say this with any pride, but I really couldn't imagine writing without a desperate deadline."
Read quote
3 likes
"Most of my stuff is just a series of false leads. I'll approach a story as a subject and then make a whole bunch of different runs at the lead. They're all good writing but they don't connect. So I end up having to string leads together."
Read quote
3 likes
"Music is an amazing thing. I don't know if we really think about it the same way we consider a painting an amazing thing. I mean, a painting is, in quotes, imaginary. There is nothing on the canvas when you start; and writing a song, there is nothing there when you start."
Read quote
3 likes
"I write whatever shows up. That's good enough for me. I'm part of the first generation that wants to still do original material and not tour around as an oldies act."
Read quote
3 likes
"People didn't know certain things about me, which... I was out of creative writing class in school, Syracuse University; had a B.A. in English and wanted to write the great American novel but I also loved rock and roll. I was in bar bands all through college, playing fraternities and have to know all the songs in the top 10. That kind of thing."
Read quote
3 likes
"For a while, I felt a little self-impelled to write Lou Reed Kind of songs. I should have understood that a Lou Reed song was anything I wanted to write about."
Read quote
3 likes
"Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way."
Read quote
3 likes
"I don't like the word rock opera, but I'm trying to write on that level that's reserved for plays still, or novels."
Read quote
3 likes
"I mean, there are peripheral things I do, I do photography, I write plays, I have books published, but that's neither here not there."
Read quote
3 likes
"Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing."
Read quote
3 likes
"After writing anything, there's always that postpartum feeling of, "What do I do now?" - I think particularly for nonfiction writers. I feel myself pulled back to the same themes, sometimes even the same moments, and I'm not sure that I want that."
Read quote
3 likes
"Lately I've been thinking about the idea that all novels are, at least in some way, about the process of writing a novel - that the construction of the book and the lineage of people constructing novels are always part of the story the author is telling. I think the equivalent for memoir should be that all memoirs are, in some way, about the process of memory. Memoirs are made out of a confusing, flawed act of creation."
Read quote
3 likes
"Walter Benjamin talks about art losing its original "aura" in an age of mechanical reproduction. In writing memoir, we're taking something that happened in a particular moment and meant something at that time, and we're trying to capture it to mass reproduce it for readers. So of course something is lost. And when we edit that material, we're getting even further from that aura, but toward something else that is potentially vital."
Read quote
3 likes
"That idea of not being exactly who you write as is so crucial. Even looking at those words as I type them, it feels dirty, it feels like I'm admitting something. Unfortunately, I think that's how the conversation around nonfiction is so much of the time - either defensive or accusatory. Aha! You've been caught! But the original essence of something is always lost when it's reproduced."
Read quote
3 likes
"Suppose we think while we talk or write--I mean, as we normally do--we shall not in general say that we think quicker than we talk, but the thought seems not to be separate from the expression."
Read quote
3 likes
"Suppose someone follows the series "1,3,5,7, ..", and in writing the series 2x+1; and he asked himself "But am I always doing the same thing, or something different every time?" If from one day to the next someone promises: "Tomorrow I will give up smoking", does he say the same thing every day, or every day something different?"
Read quote
3 likes