About Writing Quotes

I think walking is very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that's important to my ability to write.

I think writing is a very political act. I think that any writer who says it's not, is simply a writer who is disavowing the political connotations of what they write.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

I don't listen to music when I write. I need silence so I can hear the sound of the words.

If it takes you seven years to write each novel, you need a patron. And I would rather have my corporate self as my patron than any arts council or bestower of grants.

Readers don't work for writers. They work for themselves.

Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.

I don't think the function of writing, at least for me as a fiction writer, is to say to people, "Here's the answer." It's not an op-ed.

One can be well-bred and write bad poetry

I might, by chance, write something just as shoddy; But then I wouldn't show it to everybody.

It is more important to just be as honest as I can about my characters than to write some really great sentence.

I think people assume that women write about the domestic sphere. Women write about relationships and family. Men do, too, but then it's the Great American Novel.

I don't have control over how people choose to perceive me. The only thing I have control over is my writing.

I write in bed, too. I find it very comforting. I want to sort of, like, crawl in a fetal position if I have to.

Not all women write the same. But I don't understand why the model is that you're supposed to write like a man, and that means you're a real writer.

I'm very driven by writing.

I can't believe when you write something from within, how many people relate to it.

I barely have time to watch stuff that I'm in, or my friends' stuff. The bar for writing has really elevated and it's really exciting, it's not just parts for 25-year-olds.

I started writing 'Brick Lane' when my children were two years and five months old. We were on holiday in the north of England when I was overtaken by a compulsion to start writing.

I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.

Everybody writes a book too many.

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

Writing I think, out of what all of us do, writing is the hardest. You're the only who start with nothing except what's up here. You do that. It's really hard I think, acting is not.

Being a better songwriter, that's top of the list because I think that is a very intimidating, difficult task. I really admire people that just continue to write and get stronger.

I definitely want to write some fiction, for sure. I already have half of the next book. I already have it all mapped out. I'm ready. I'm ready to bring it to the world.

Tasting is an act of pleasure and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.

One writes in order to feel.

Writing does not numb, comfort, or soothe me. It does the opposite. It tends to excite me and reinscribe pain. It doesn't function as exorcism.

I didn't write much until I turned 40. Up until then I felt constrained by a sense of the discipline of New Testament studies and a sense of the ruling elite in theology and biblical studies.

I am an advocate of one form of the New Perspective. But there are as many new perspectives as there are people writing about it.

When you're writing theology, you have to say everything all the time, otherwise people think you've deliberately missed something out.

Do not slip into writing for the mind and the mind alone. In other words, do not play merely upon our ability to reason. And do not focus only on visuals. Write for the whole person.

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

Learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of the South African way of life.

Perhaps the best way to write is to do so as if one were already dead, afraid of no one's reactions, answerable to no one's views.

I shall never write an autobiography, I'm much too jealous of my privacy for that.

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

I couldn't imagine having to write a paper and have to think about what song I am going to sing.

I'd love to branch out but I have absolutely no interest in romance. I just don't. The thought of trying to write a rom-com ... it just completely skeeves me out. No!

To justify an unorthodox life by writing about it is to re-inscribe the original violation, to re-violate masculine turf.

Writing is not, alas, like riding a bicycle: it does not get easier with practice.

I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.

The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!

The word impossible is not French.

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

I felt better about myself that I did it [calling Max Askeli Commander Askeli], rather than have - rather than thinking it and not writing it for being afraid of what might happen to me.