Writing Quotes
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I tend to be more of a novel writer. In fact, some of my novels started out as short stories, and I just got carried away! I think some of my best writing is in the short story form, but novels come more naturally to me.
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My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments.
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I'm older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.
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People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.
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If you can't write your song in half an hour, you're in trouble - which is always true.
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Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south? Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
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These matters having been arranged, I had a temporary awning erected near the river, and was for three or four days busily employed writing an account of our journey for the Governor's information.
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I don't think I could have just kept writing the 'Richard Jury' books. It wasn't that I was bored or dissatisfied. I just had to write something else.
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I think without writing I would feel completely useless.
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When I hear a great new record, especially when it's by someone that I respect and admire, then a part of me is like, Why didn't I think of that? Why didn't I write that record? It makes you sick, but in a way it can be a great thing. It makes you want to go back to the lab and start writing again. Maybe it will inspire you to try a little harder.
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It's not the case of turning in a bunch of songs and recording the next month. I think you're looking for songs all year long and you're writing all year long.
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There are two different ways of writing a novel. The first I call the traditional father way, when the novelist slightly situates himself or herself above the text and knows what each and every character is going to do. It's a bit like engineering. I've never felt close to that tradition. I like the second way, which relies a bit more on intuition.
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Writing in the electronic world, you imagine a sound, and then you have to go and find it. It's not like imagining a flute and then making that sound materialize. That's easy!
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I think as the world changes, we have to keep up. We have to note what is happening, and I think writing has always had a powerful corrective influence and possibility. We have to write about what's good, and we also have to write about parts of our culture that are not good, that are not working out. I think it takes a new eye.
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An author who enjoys writing may sometimes please other people by accident, but he can never pass on to any one else the zestful thrill he feels himself.
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I remember my dad working with me on breaking down my script and writing out a back story for my character and all that stuff.
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Reading and writing is so important, and it's something I am really keen to promote. It's something that can be a bit lost these days with so much else going on.
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Careful writing is important for many reasons, not least that intelligent but hurried reporters will trust the presser, resulting in a cascade of secondary damage.
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I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.
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I always want to make sure the book I'm writing is the best book I can deliver.
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There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.
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In theory, food writing is an aid or a prelude to actual meals: you read a recipe, and then you cook. In practice - in a 'paradox' that Michael Pollan, among others, has identified - our current gastronomic fantasies, particularly on TV, have coincided with a decline in home cooking.
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I'm really not one of these procrastinators who cleans the house in order to put off writing, but life gets in the way.
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By junior high, I was a horrible student. But during my sophomore year of high school, I did have a fabulous English teacher, and I would go to school just for her class and then skip out afterwards. That's actually when I started writing, although I didn't think of it then as something I might someday do.
