Writing Quotes

One good reason for writing novels based on your life is that you have something to read in old age when you've forgotten what happened.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.

When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.

The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior.

I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.

I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.

If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

Becoming a mother cannot help but change things. An author's life is reflected in their writing, whether they want it to be or not, and parenthood is one of the biggest life changes there is.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

We wanted to create an environment where if a game player enjoyed the "writing style" of a particular game designer, he or she could look for the next game by that same author and not be disappointed.

My mother bought a piano, put it in the front room, and I just started writing my songs.

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

The problem, for me, with the writing programs is that they produce a terrible uniformity of product.

Good acting is all in the writing. If it isn't on the page, then it really won't make any difference. You cannot act on force of personality alone.

People are always wondering if I am an artist or political activist or politician. Maybe I'll just clearly tell you: Whatever I do is not art. Let's say it is just objects or materials, movies or writing, but not art, OK?

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind.

Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.

I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off.

Writing is a passion I have never understood, yet a storyteller is all I have ever wanted to be.

I wasted a lot of years working on my writing and very grandly saying, 'And now... My Novel!,' which would soon be reduced to a short story, then to a paragraph.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.