Writing Quotes
-
Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.
-
Anyone who goes into writing has to find out somewhere along the line, he's either naive or insane.
-
I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.
-
I don't think you can write from a reactive place. I think you just write the thing you want to write about, and if other people are writing about it, that doesn't really come to bear on what you want to do.
-
You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.
-
We'll keep writing and if it hits our standards we'll go with it. We're not here to destroy anything. It's as precious to us as it is for someone who's followed us for years.
-
I did my dissertation on the idea of femininity and women's writing, so I spent eight months reading about how women are portrayed in the media in terms of images and tone of voice and what words are used.
-
Writing is hard work. Generating stories that catch people's attention and holding it are very difficult.
-
But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
-
I was married at the time when I first joined the band and my wife said: 'Why don't you write a song about me ?' So I wrote 'She's got balls'. Then she divorced me.
-
I've had quite a lot to conquer in myself apart from writing. Not that I've been a pure angel when I come to the end of it.
-
As for what I listen to after writing, it could be anything - but I've noticed that if the current book contains music from one tradition, it is music from another tradition that most relaxes me.
-
Everyone seems to see bleakness and despair in my books. I don't read them that way. I see myself as writing comic books, books about ordinary people trying to live ordinary, dull, happy lives while the world is falling to pieces around them.
-
I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.
-
Yeah, I've been interested in music since I was a teenager, always writing songs.
-
Writing is like travelling. It's wonderful to go somewhere, but you get tired of staying.
-
Oh, I just tend to believe in things when I'm writing them. For instance, when I was writing 'Doctor Dee,' I believed in magic. And when I wrote 'Hawksmoor' I believed in psychic geography. But as soon as I type the last full stop, I'm back to being a complete blank again.
-
I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'
-
Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me.
-
I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.
-
Writing makes you feel better, to get it all out.
-
I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.
-
Writing so that I can act became a way of having not more control over my future but not having to wait for permission. You can choose yourself. Hmm, who should play this part? I nominate me!
-
'Life's That Way' was an extraordinarily difficult book to write, because it wasn't written as a book. It was written as a journal of events that were happening as I wrote it, without the space or time either to digest or analyze those events and without the hindsight and peace that writing in the aftermath would have provided.
