About Writing Quotes

Writing a story, you understand, is not done by consensus. But we do learn from each other, and we remind ourselves how important this work we're doing is.

I was always writing. I just didn't know if I was any good.

Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing.

Hell, I'm going to play pro basketball. I'm going to maybe be famous. I'm going to write books.

So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don't know why.

The diary will really try and tell people who you are and what you were. The alternative is writing nothing, or creating a totally lifeless, as it is leafless, garden.

I feel better off doing what I know how to do. I feel a strong element of fictional style in travel writing anyway. Some call it creative nonfiction.

I find the public reaction to writing - it's fascinating in this modern age. Of course people are able to interact with me and email me, and I get quite a few I suppose.

One does have to learn to travel with a degree of humility and that reflected in writing and personality.

I would love to write a book that opens people's eyes to the more interesting side.

I am always surprised when people do get upset. Perhaps its just the nutty people who write to newspapers who get upset.

I was writing the Paraguay book, a Paragauyan told me that only five thousand people in Paraguay read.

I'd like to write fiction. Perhaps at some stage.

American travel writing is very healthy. I'm always flicking through the reviews and I see plenty of travel writing - and an impressive line up and continual demand.

Everything a man writes about himself is instructive.

One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.

Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.

Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.

Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel.

The right story needs the right telling.

I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers - where you repeat what you've already said with phrases like 'In summation', and 'To conclude'.

In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.

I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance.

One thing that drives me nuts... well, let me ask you, when writers write do they not use quotation marks anymore?

I cannot write as well as some people; my talent is in coming up with good stories about lawyers.That is what I am good at.

My name became a brand and I'd love to say it was the plan from the start. But the only plan was to keep writing books. And I've stuck to that ever since.

Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn't sure how to start.

Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.

I thought of God as being able to talk big and write *very* small.

For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.

Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, "Good job."

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

I'm a very old-fashioned novelist. I write 19th-century novels, where a lot of rules apply.

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

How do you prevent people from doing inappropriate things? We can write laws. But at the end of the day, I actually wonder what the board was doing.

I should write for the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even if my night's labors should be burnt every morning and no eye shine upon them.

Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.