Quotes On Writing - A Collection of Famous Writers

Alice Munro

"The only thing that I've ever had to fill my life has been writing."

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"The constant happiness is curiosity."

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"Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories."

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"A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You can go back again and again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you."

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"I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel."

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"One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolor everything like a drop of black ink in white milk."

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"Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story."

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"In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward."

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"You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing."

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"I knew I would be famous one day. That's because I lived in a very small town and nobody liked doing the same thing I did, like writing."

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"In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone's else needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it."

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"There's a kind of tension that if I'm getting a story right I can feel right away, and I don't feel that when I try to write a novel. I kind of want a moment that's explosive, and I want everything gathered to that."

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"People are curious. A few people are... They will put things together, knowing all along that they may be mistaken. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in hope of seeing this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish."

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"I don't know if I needed inspiration. I just thought that stories are so important in the world and I want to make up some of these stories."

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"Who can ever say the perfect thing to the poet about his poetry?"

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"The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple."

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"Reading was my life really until I was thirty. I was living in books. The writers of the American South were the first writers who really moved me because they showed me that you could write about small towns, rural people, and that kind of life I knew really well." 

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"I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me."

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"I became a short story writer totally without planning."

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"I always think the people I'm writing about are extraordinary."

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"It just seems like the best thing you can do with your life... To have got so far into human experience seems to me like a marvellous use of one's time on earth."

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"When you're a writer, you're never quite like other people... You're always finding your way in this secret world."

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"I want my stories to move people."

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"I was probably well into my 40's before anyone took much notice of me... I didn't have to please anyone but myself. That was important."

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"In writing, I've always had a lot of confidence, mixed with a dread that this confidence is entirely misplaced."

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"Because I didn't live with any people who thought about writing, then I had this ability to just say, 'Well, I can do it.'"

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"I vary between wild enthusiasm and great doubt. That never stops."

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"What I would wish for all writers is that they find some truth that they want very much to express, and that they get a chance to do it."

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"It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you're going to be a writer you'll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think 'There must be something else people do,' you won't be able to quit."

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"Usually, I have a lot of acquaintance with the story before I start writing it. When I didn't have regular time to give to writing, stories would just be working in my head for so long that when I started to write I was deep into them. Now, I do that work by filling notebooks."

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"Lovers. Not a soft word, as people thought, but cruel and tearing."

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"I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn't that truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn't mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in such a way that you feel you are a different person when you finish."

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"The stories are not autobiographical, but they're personal in that way. I seem to know only the things that I've learned. Probably some things through observation, but what I feel I know surely is personal."

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"Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about."

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"Writing is hard, but the more you write, and enjoy what you write, the better it gets."

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