Writing Quotes
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What's invaluable about actually going to the places you want to write about are the random accidental things that happen. Random, accidental detail is the best way to make a setting convincing. You can of course invent your own random details, and sometimes I will also mash up real incidents.
Zachary Lazar
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You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.
Jimmy Buffett
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By the time I wrote my memoir, 'Men We Reaped,' I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I'd probably write about them one day. I didn't want to. I'd studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.
Jesmyn Ward
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[Presently, science undergraduates] do not learn to write clearly and briefly, marshalling their points in due and aesthetically satisfying order, and eliminating inessentials. They are inept at those turns of phrase or happy analogy which throw a flying bridge across a chasm of misunderstanding and make contact between mind and mind.
William Lawrence Bragg
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Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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I have to always remember, writing is really hard.
David Remnick
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As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because society and people are our meat, one really doesn’t belong in the midst of society. The great challenge in writing is always to find the universal in the local, the parochial. And to do that, one needs distance.
William Trevor
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I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.
Andre Dubus III
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I don't listen to much music on the go because I tend either to be writing my own music or wanting a break from the music around me.
Jack Garratt
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Authors like reading. Go figure. So it's not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.
Edward M. Lerner
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Writing for the page is only one form of writing for the eye. Wherever solemn inscriptions are put up in public places, there is a sense that the site and the occasion demand a form of writing which goes beyond plain informative prose. Each word is so valued that the letters forming it are seen as objects of solemn beauty.
James Fenton
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I actually started writing publishable stuff the day I decided I'd actually like to write something I'd like to read, and stopped trying to think what does everyone actually want.
Jennifer Fallon
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You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
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I'm a physicist and computer scientist by training. I worked in high tech for thirty years as everything from engineer to senior vice president - for many of those years, writing SF as a hobby - until, in 2004, I began writing full time.
Edward M. Lerner
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When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there.
Leo Ornstein
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I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.
John Darnielle
