Quotes about Writing: O

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
The pleasure is the rewriting: The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written. This is a koan-like statement, and I don’t mean to sound needlessly obscure or mysterious, but it’s simply true. The completion of any work automatically necessitates its revisioning. ~ ~Joyce Carol Oates
I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all. ~ Joyce Carol Oates
Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~ Sharon O'Brien
Do not be grand. Try to get the ordinary into your writing — breakfast tables rather than the solar system; Middletown today, not Mankind through the ages. ~ Darcy O’Brien
Don’t fake enthusiasms. Say what you think, not what you think you ought to think. ~ Darcy O’Brien

Writing doesn’t get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write. ~ Tim O’Brien
If you do not have an alert and curious interest in character and dramatic situation, if you have no visual imagination and are unable to distinguish between honest emotional reactions and sentimental approaches to life, you will never write a competent short story. ~ Edward J. O'Brien
When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another. ~ Sean O’Casey
I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can’t operate at all, of course, except on believable material. ~ Flannery O’Connor
When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business. ~ Flannery O'Connor
The less self-conscious you are about what you are about, the better in a way, that is to say technically. You have to get it in your blood, not in the head. ~ Flannery O’Connor
As for the blood and the head business, the blood and the head work together and what is not first in the blood can sometimes reach it by going first through the head and what is wrong in the blood can sometimes be tempered by the head. ~ Flannery O’Connor

When using dialect, use it lightly. A dialect word here and there is enough. All you want to do is suggest. Never let it call attention to itself. ~ Flannery O’Connor
You get a real person down there and his talking will take care of itself. ~ Flannery O’Connor
Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written. ~ Flannery O’Connor
It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much. ~ Flannery O’Connor
It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see. ~ Flannery O’Connor
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. ~ Flannery O'Connor
The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry. ~ Sean O'Faolain

The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot. ~ Sean O'Faolain
If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried. ~ Susan Ohanian
Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer. ~ John O'Hara
Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep. ~ Catherine O'Hara
You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world. ~ Sarah Orne Jewett
Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. ~ George Orwell
If one corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. ~ George Orwell

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? ~ George Orwell
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. ~ George Orwell
Writers don't need love; all they require is money. ~ John Osborne
Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lampost what it feels about dogs. ~ John Osborne
One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing into a habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession. Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic, physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating. ~ Niyi Osundare