John Steinbeck Quotes About Writing
-
I write because I like to write. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythm of words. It is a satisfaction like that which follows good and shared love.
→ -
The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.
→ -
I do want to make it very convincing. And the best way to do that is to put most of it in dialogue.
→ -
A creative person has to be alive. He can't borrow from things he's done in the past. He can't let his method choose his subjects or his characters. They can't be warped to fit his style.
→ -
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.
→ -
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
→ -
Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page a day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
→ -
The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness.
→ -
I start out to write five days a week, and then it runs to six days and finally seven. Then, eventually, that wave of weariness overwhelms me and I don't know what's the matter. That is, I know but I won't admit it. I'm just tired from writing. As you get older, writing becomes harder. By that I mean you see so many more potentialities. Things like transition used to trouble me. But not any more. When I say it's harder, I'm not talking about facility. You learn all the so-called tricks, but then you don't want to use them.
→ -
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
→ -
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do...Try to be better than yourself.
→ -
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.
→ -
If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it-bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there.
→ -
A woman journalist in England asked me why Americans usually wrote about their childhood and a past that happened only in imagination, why they never wrote about the present. This bothered me until I realized why - that a novelist wants to know how it comes out, that he can't be omnipotent writing a book about the present, particularly this one.
→ -
Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product I turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. Consequently criticism doesn't mean anything to me. As a disciplinary matter, it is too late.
→ -
The craft of writing is the art of penetrating other minds with the figures that are in your own mind.
→ -
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
→ -
I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book; it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through.
→ -
To finish is sadness to a writer — a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.
→ -
A good writer always works at the impossible.There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.
→ -
I wish to God I knew as much about writing as I did when I was 19. I was absolutely certain about most things then. Also, I suspect, more accurate.
→ -
I guess there are never enough books.
→ -
If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced that there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes but by no means always find the way to do it.
→ -
In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration.
→ -
Boileau said that Kings, Gods and Heroes only were fit subjects for literature. The writer can only write about what he admires. Present-day kings aren't very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.
→ -
Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.
→ -
Three hours of writing require twenty hours of preparation. Luckily I have learned to dream about the work, which saves me some working time.
→ -
I am writing this from what we Americans call Yurrp. In Yurrp writers are taken as seriously as Lana Turner's legs are in America - a ridiculous situation.
→ -
The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by.
→ -
Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.
→
Related Authors
-
F. Scott Fitzgerald Author -
Mark Twain Author -
John Dos Passos Novelist -
James Joyce Novelist -
William Faulkner Writer -
Jack Kerouac Novelist -
Herman Melville Novelist -
Charles Dickens Writer -
George Orwell Novelist -
Thomas Steinbeck Writer -
Ernest Hemingway Author -
Kurt Vonnegut Writer -
Woody Guthrie Singer-songwriter -
Jane Austen Novelist -
Jack London Author -
J. D. Salinger Writer -
William Golding Novelist -
Nathaniel Hawthorne Novelist -
Ray Bradbury Writer