Quotes about Writing

Writing just for the hell of it is heaven.

The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to the earth by staking it down, extends its dominion by drawing a grid of straight lines and right angles across the body of a continent – across north America, across Africa, across Australia – defining states and provinces, counties and countries with scant regard for the oral peoples that already live there, according to a calculative logic utterly impervious to the life of the land.

If I say that I live in the “United States” or in “Canada,” in “British Colombia” or in “New Mexico,” I situate myself within a purely human set of coordinates. I say little or nothing about the earthly place that I inhabit, but simply establish my temporary location within a shifting matrix of political, economic, and civilizational forces struggling to maintain themselves, today, largely at the expense of the animate earth. The great danger is that I, and many other good persons, may come to believe that our breathing bodies really inhabit these abstractions, and that we will lend our lives more to consolidating, defending, or bewailing the fate of these ephemeral entities than to nurturing and defending the actual places that physically sustain us.

Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.

Once the stories are written down, the visible text becomes the primary mnemonic activator of the spoken stories – the inked traces left by the pen as it traverses the page replacing the earthly tracks left by the animals, and by one’s animal ancestors, as they moved across the land. The places themselves are no longer necessary to the remembrance of the stories, and often come to seem wholly incidental to the tales, the arbitrary backdrops for human events that might just as well have happened elsewhere. The transhuman, ecological determinants of the originally oral stories are no longer emphasized, and often are written out of the tales entirely. In this manner the stories and myths, as they lose their oral, performative character, forfeit as well their intimate links to the more-than-human earth. And the land itself, stripped of the particularizing stories that once sprouted from every cave and streambed and cluster of trees, begins to lose its multiplicitous power. The human senses, intercepted by the written word, are no longer gripped and fascinated by the expressive shapes and sounds of particular places. The spirits fall silent. Gradually the felt primacy of place is forgotten, superceded by a new, abstract notion of “space” as a homogenous and placeless void.

In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land.

Written truth is four-dimensional. If we consult it at the wrong time, or read it at the wrong place, it is as empty and shapeless as a dress on a hook.

There are many excuses not to write. Try using writing as an excuse not to do other things.

Don't be afraid.  Don't be daunted.  Just do your job.  Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be.  If your job is to dance, do your dance.  If the divine cock-eyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment, through your efforts, then olé!  And if not, do your dance anyhow, and olé to you nonetheless.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you've read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and it belongs to you forever:the happiness and unhappiness, the good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and weather. If you can give that to reader, then you're a writer

How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?

Someone will ask later, sometimes
searching for a name, his own or someone's else's
why I neglected his sadness or his love...

But I didn't have enough time or ink for everyone.

Or maybe it was the strain of the city, of time
the cold heart of the clocks...

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.

When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.

Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

Books are like eggs - best when fresh.

I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.

The writer speaks not TO his audience (who wants to listen to lectures?) but FOR them, expressing their thoughts and emotions through the imaginative power of his art.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time... Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

For what I have publish'd, I can only hope to be pardon'd; but for what I have burned, I deserve to be prais'd.

Modern myths are the role plays of collective consciousness.

My job [as a writer] is to awaken in the reader his or her own sense of wonder.

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't I'd die.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.

There is my desert.