Re Writing Quotes

When I began writing, it was a cosmic thing: Inspiration! Wham! Short spurts of time when I felt out of touch with reality, temporarily insane and the result: a song!

This is also an execellent time to ask this question: Did I get lazy and go for a quick rhyme?

What's interesting about songs where the writer is genuinely in love with words is that it's easy to read the lyrics like a poem.

When I write I am the real me.

I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.

I didn't (and still don't) have comments [in my blog]. It's about simply writing for an audience of One.

The book [ One Thousand Gifts] took just over a year to write, on the fringe hours, early and late, around home educating 6 kids and farming and blogging.

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like that.

It's a lot easier to act when the writing is good. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to figure out 'Well, why did I say this next?'

Other friends have said, "I don't understand why you've used this trumpet-style sound rather than a real one when you know you can write for trumpet." But it's most important to get the energy right.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.

I don't really read what people write about me. Someone gives my novel one star; are they a troll? Are they someone who hates my politics and so has decided to do that?

Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.

The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.

Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.

The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.

I do a lot of mental work before I ever start writing.

If you want to write for T.V. and movies, you will be subjected to kind and unkind criticism. You had better get used to it and develop a shell.

It sounds shameful, but on my best days I write only about three or four hours.

I cannot get him to write or speak in real, solid earnest. I don't much mind it now, but if it be always so, what shall I do with the serious part of myself?

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should 'teach writing,' which I have no idea how to do and don't really believe in.

Writing is not complete when you've added everything you could, but rather, when you've taken away everything that is not needed.

Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.

To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.

I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

I write anywhere - when I have an idea it’s hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn’t be disturbed, it really filled my day.

I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

I think it’s very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.

I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.

One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised

When I write after dark", observed Cyril Connolly, "the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose

Let's not talk about it any more, but if you still want anything please write to me about it, because I can say what I mean much better on paper.

There's something happening everyday, but I'm too tired and lazy to write it all down.

My life's goal is not to write books; my life's goal is to know God better today. The neat thing about a goal like that is you can achieve it. Faith is constant; it's a relationship.

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.

The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.

Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.

If you are hoping to find your self-worth and fulfillment in other peoples' opinion of your writing, you will never find it.

I write everything as a wake-up call to myself and others, to anyone who may have gotten tired of hitting the snooze button.

Needless to say, there was no one around remotely fitting the description of a normal person: I was at a writing conference.

Just don't pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don't. Stay open to them. It's teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It's that simple.