About Writing Quotes

Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.

If people would write exactly what I wanted to read I wouldn't feel so compelled to write myself

So many wonderful books to write, and not enough hours in the day. An embarrassment of riches.

I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else

I feel so fortunate to get paid to be an actor. I pinch myself. I get it from writing, I get it from baking, gardening... I sort of open myself to the creative flow, which is hard to do, by the way.

At night I can write for hours.

One of my biggest goals, especially with writing YA novels, is just to have people enjoy reading.

I don't call magazines and let them know about things so they can write stories.

That's one of the great thing about writing is that you get to be in someone's head.

It was my fifth grade teacher who introduced the idea that writing could be more than a hobby for me.

The only characters I ever don't like are ones that leave no impression on me. And I don't write characters that leave no impression on me.

Write words you’re willing to burn at the stake for. Write words you’d believe in even if the rest of the world didn’t.

Writing a memoir isn't particularly interesting to me. I'm not like Ellen [DeGeneres], where I can write, 'Water bottles--they're crazy!' and it's funny.

Actors should ACT. Not sell perfume, or write cookbooks.

I like writing dialogue - I can hear my characters so clearly that writing dialogue often feels as much like transcribing something as it does like creating it.

A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.

I'm a writer, not an actor. I want to write rather than perform. I'm looking forward to disappearing for a while.

At least in my case, a very simple, regular, happy life makes for better writing.

Writing by hand is a way of letting mystery into my writing. But I'm constantly trying to figure out how to do this job. It's a work in progress.

It's wonderful that nothing you write is ever going to be as beautiful as what's in your head, because that gap is where the art can enter and begin to stretch its limbs.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.

When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.

Even the presence of my kids cannot, during those writing hours, disturb me. Unless there's a bone sticking out of their arm, I'm not interested.

The best songs that I write usually come in, like, two minutes, and I think a lot of songwriters would probably say those kind of songs that come just like that are the good ones.

Writing with other people is the only way I ever really work. In some ways it's great because it's helpful to someone pull you out of the loop.

Writing is such a weird emotional thing. It's hard. If you sit down with a plan to write something, it's going to be harder.

The walls are covered -crammed- with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface. Love.

Make your novel readable. Make it easy to read, pleasant to read. This doesn't mean flowery passages, ambitious flights of pyrotechnic verbiage; it means strong, simple, natural sentences.

I write and play music. I'd like to be a musician at some point.

I had never thought of myself as a dramatist, and, for really good technical results, the thought came too late: a man of letters has become too wordy to write economically for the stage.

If I live for another ten years I shall probably have written all that I want to write.

All of us ambitious young writers hoped to have a cover story in Esquire, of course. The idea was to write the best, most entertaining article that you can.

To write an article about someone and then to have that person murdered is disturbing.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

I have written a few children's books. The first book that I wrote was for children. It was called "The Package", and it was a mystery story in pictures. It had no words.

I see and write things first as an artist, second as a woman, and third as a New Yorker. All three have built-in perspectives that aren't neutral.

In writing, as in life, always be true to your character.

I don't see the direct correlation between my personal life and the novel I'm writing until I'm at the end of the novel or very close to it.

I've realized that with each novel I seem to set out a kind of puzzle for myself. And I am never sure in the process of writing a first draft how it's all going to turn out.

Fundamentally I think we all write the kinds of work we'd most like to read. Or we try to.

I watch some kids ask the cafeteria ladies to sign their books. What do they write: "Hope your chicken patties never bleed?" Or, maybe, "May your Jell-O always wiggle?

Writing involves an acceptance of being on the margin, the threshold, a galvanization out of received notions into a more activated, kinetic, often perilous, seeing.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.