About Writing Quotes

I've been gratified to see over the twenty or so years of my writing life the West become less of a colony of the East; maybe new technologies and too much travel undermine the idea of provinciality.

The momentum of production keeps you from giving up, so it's really the editing and writing phases where things can look bleakest.

My way of writing a book is completely disorganized - to hurl myself at the problem, over and over.

Writing reminds you that you're never alone. Writing and reading is to be optimistic.

You can't fake it. Bad writing is a gift.

When I'm not writing music, I'm playing guitar, or reading philosophy. So all I have left is just an hour or two for Claudia Schiffer.

Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

I just like to entertain myself by sitting down and writing songs.

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.

Updike worked this way, and I just kinda borrowed it from him. So the memoir will be relief from novel writing for a moment.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have had the level of success I've had. I was just writing stories for my own sons.

I wanted to spend all my time writing poetry. But when I had children I couldn't do that anymore.

You have to be an extremely good reader to appreciate what a good writer is. There are some people who are completely insensitive to good writing.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

I find writing songs hard, because it does not come naturally to me. I never set out to be a songwriter or a singer.

[On book promotion:] The reward for writing well appears to be not to be able to do it for a long time.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

Writing history and biography for kids calls for special skills that can only be acquired through practice and that are different from those required for an adult audience.

Writing a book is a way of thinking to me, the only way of thinking that I have found successful.

I have some great stories and I will get around to writing a book.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

I've always been into writing love songs.

That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.

The comments you'll get from a filmmaker about your performance are going to be very different. My writing workshop is about mixing it up, cross-pollinating, not only in genres but in occupations.

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

My writing process is very organic. I start with an idea. I have the general story arc and the cast. But then I sit down to write, and things change.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

I have to say that writing about my writing process is more daunting than writing non-fiction.

For all forms, writing dialogue is almost like writing music. I pay close attention to rhythms and tones.

I personally love books that make me think, so I naturally gravitate toward writing a book like that, one that's going to make someone think and make me think.

I'll tell you what I was most surprised to discover about my writing process, and that is that I never know what I'm doing.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.

I don't love performing, because it's nerve-racking and it's time - consuming to rehearse a whole set - and my time can often be better served writing music and just making it and putting it out.

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

Following takes why. Transactions take what. It has to be real. It has to be the same for writing a book.

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.

I began just writing poems and then fell in love with the form.

Writing fiction is like remembering what never happened.

Originally I was not writing songs for myself

I have been writing songs since I was 9 years old, so writing has and always will be my first love and passion.

Writing songs about fancying people in dance clubs is all very well but it's not the be-all and end-all. There are other topics.

I try to not be self-conscious in my writing process.

Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again.

I'm convinced that FEAR is at the root, of all bad writing

The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate - four to six hours a day, every day - will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them.

...writing fiction...is no job for intellectual cowards.