Quotes about Writing

I must admit it's a surprise to find myself still here, still talking to you. I prefer to think of it as talking, although of course it isn't: I'm saying nothing, you're hearing nothing. The only thing between us is this black line: a thread thrown onto the empty page, into the empty air.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

The way I understand things, the Bible may have been thought out by God, but it was written down by men. And like everything men write down, such as the newspapers, they got the main story right but some of the details wrong.

She writes like an angel, it says of Laura on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin. An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact angels don't write much. They record sins and the names of the dammed and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: God be with you is not an unmixed blessing.

That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.

I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know myself what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn't write doesn't know how wonderful it is.

When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived!

It's an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because i have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I -nor for that matter anyone else- will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen year old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie burried deep in my heart.

Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl