
Aphorisms About Writing

I was asked to provide a quote about the writing life, and the prompt turned me to jelly. But then just now I was Gchatting with Michael Kimball, and we talk about this stuff a lot, so I made him help me face the challenge. Then Amy McDaniel came home and I told her about it and she jumped in. We had a lot of fun and some of our aphorisms are pretty good, and some are really bad.
Thoughts on the writing life
- “Write first thing in the morning, before you wake up.” —Adam Robinson
- “The writing life is difficult and beautiful and depressing and exciting and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” —Michael Kimball
- “Writers think in spirals, not circles.” —Amy McDaniel
- “Writing is nothing like anything else, even writing.” —Adam Robinson
- “I would write more books, but I prefer ideas.” —Michael Kimball
- “Every sentence is a shovelful of dirt to bury the sentence before it.” —Amy McDaniel
- “If you can vividly remember the way it made you feel when you finished writing something years ago, you’re a writer.” —Adam Robinson
- “Someone asked me once, ‘What do you write about,’ and I politely declined a third date.” —Amy McDaniel
- “Write something that nobody else has ever written, in a way that nobody else has ever written, etc.” —Michael Kimball
- “Write something fucked up, because I’ve read all the regular stuff.” —Michael Kimball
- “I’m not concerned about the size of my vocabulary, but about the elasticity of my lexicon.” —Amy McDaniel
- “Heidegger asked, ‘Why is there being at all? Why not, far rather, nothing.’ And then he kept writing. And so must we all.” —Adam Robinson
- “You have to break eggs to make eggs, but there was already an egg in there before you came along.” —Amy McDaniel
- “Write like your life depended on it. It doesn’t, but what else are you going to do?” —Michael Kimball
- “I am most proud of something I wrote when I imagine reading it to a roomful of people who don’t care, and I get nervous.” —Adam Robinson
- “It isn’t true that writers aren’t good for any work but writing.” —Amy McDaniel
- “I write to figure out why I can’t paint.” —Adam Robinson
- “Writing is like a cigarette addiction. Hold on, I have to step outside for a few minutes.” —Michael Kimball
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“Not writing is not like not sleeping or not eating, but it is like not getting out of bed when you really aren’t sick anymore.” —Amy McDaniel
- “I wish the English language had a different way of doing prepositions.” —Amy McDaniel
- “I never finish writing anything. I just write to the point where I’m not too embarrassed to say it’s done.” —Adam Robinson
- “If I could be a baseball player, I would be, but I’m a writer.” —Michael Kimball
- “Writing is like a video game, except it’s free to start over.” —Michael Kimball and Adam Robinson
- “Write what you think you know.” —Adam Robinson
- “Aphorisms about writing are like the water water that’s everywhere but you can’t drink it.” —Amy McDaniel
- “Don’t write to express yourself. Write to disguise yourself. Your choice of costume is more honest than whatever you think is in your soul.” —Amy McDaniel
- “The hardest thing about writing is keeping up with the ideas.” —Adam Robinson
- “Writing is a life saver, the kind that melts in your mouth.” —Michael Kimball
- “Throwing a discus is like writing a novel —Jamie Iredell (said something like that)” —Michael Kimball
- “Prompts and constraints generally inspire better work.” —Adam Robinson
- “It is hard to accept that people aren’t trying to be mean when they ask what I’m working on.” —Amy McDaniel
- “The best app for writing is a nAppkin.” —Adam Robinson
- “Writing is too difficult, if you don’t love it.” —Michael Kimball
- “Writing is like being a rat in a maze trying to develop a cognitive map, so the fucking lab researcher will leave you alone and just let you eat all the cheese you keep finding.” —Michael Kimball
- “Rilke said ‘a writer is a person who must write,’ but I think that’s stupid. I think Flannery O’Connor said, like, ‘a writer is a person who can write,’ so that’s what I go by. I can write really well.” —Adam Robinson
- “There are all kinds of ways to be a writer. You don’t have to write every day to be a writer. That is a very male idea and I reject it.” —Amy McDaniel
- “You can make up whatever you want. A story can be absolutely anything.” —Michael Kimball
- “Writing is to money as farts are to the Constitution. Is ‘the constitution’ supposed to be capitalized?” —Adam Robinson
- “Writing fiction is like making monopoly money. You can’t spend it but it makes you happy.” —Michael Kimball and Adam Robinson
- “Writing is like a cassette tape—there’s nothing to play it on.” —Michael Kimball
- “I’d write with my dick if it wasn’t too big to hold with my fingers. —Henry Miller” —Michael Kimball
And then Michael was like, “Okay, that’s it.” And then:
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“Everything is perfect as long as I don’t read what I just wrote.” —Michael Kimball
Can you help add your own? I’m still looking for that perfect one, even though Amy and Michael were real helpful. I just wish I’d known that about Amy on our second date.
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