“Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.”
More from John Updike on Writing
“The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.”
“The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.”
“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.”
Others on Writing
Ernest Hemingway
17 quotes“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Somerset Maugham
12 quotes“we do not write as we want but as we can”
Virginia Woolf
12 quotes“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”
Salman Rushdie
11 quotes“I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until a religion came after me.”
Kafka
10 quotes“Writing is prayer.”
Flaubert
9 quotes“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”
Ray Bradbury
9 quotes“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.”
Jorge Luis Borges
8 quotes“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
Flannery O'Connor
7 quotes“Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.”
Harold Bloom
7 quotes“Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.”
Ezra Pound
6 quotes“This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 quotes“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”