Writing Quotes

We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

Just writing and being in the studio was like therapy for me.

In terms of writing about horses, I fell backwards into that. I was intent on getting a Ph.D., becoming a professor, and writing on history but I got sick 14 years ago when I was 19. Getting sick derailed that plan completely.

I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

I like writing a lot more than I used to. I used to find it scary but now I've got used to it once it gets going. I used to find it hard to start. Fear of the blank page. The first thing you write down won't bear any relation to what's in your head and that's always disappointing.

Me and Norman Mailer have talked about how hard it is in America to get better. Especially at writing.

When the stories come easily and the writing process doesn't feel laboring, that's usually a good sign for me.

When I am fishing, I think quite a lot about the fish, but I also think about the book I'm writing.

Nu shu means women's writing. And it was a secret writing system that was invented by women, used by women and kept a secret by women in one very remote county in China for a thousand years. It's the only language that was invented and used by women to have been found anywhere in the world.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

And after about two years, I realized that creative writing was not going to help you ace those biological tests. So I switched over to journalism. I didn't graduate with honors, but I did graduate on time and with some doing.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives - one is so very small - but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.

At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.

And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.

I feel like I was writing as I was learning to talk. Writing was always a go-to form of communication. And I knew I could sing from being in tune with the radio.

This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended.

Manipulating shadows and tonality is like writing music or a poem.

Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.

There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.

I enjoy what I do every minute of the day, even when the going gets tough. When I first began writing, I used to work at a desk in the bedroom, of a small development house. My three sons all under the age of 3 would come running in and out of the room every minute.

As an actor, I go where the good writing is. That's the bottom line.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

I'm not writing a Ph.D. Dissertation.

While I'm playing baseball, I'm still writing songs and having tapes sent to me. I'm sure I'll spend a lot of time in the whirlpool resting these tired bones, so I'll be thinking of music then.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.