writing Quotes

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.

Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

Verbs allow you to communicate a story in a much more converged or involuntary way for a reader. The verbs allow you to come in under the radar, below people's defenses.

'At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom' by Amy Hempel showed me the lean quality of prose.