Writing Quotes
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Generally, I think most of my writing tends to have some kind of magical element to it. That's the way I can access the emotional life of the character.
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A knowledge of craft is not the enemy of creativity. You sit down to write and realize, today's going to be a really unconscious day and I'm going to let it all out. Or, today's going to be analytical. And some days all mixed up.
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At least for me, writing a book is continual exposure to blind spots. There were things I wanted to be true and wanted to believe, but it always got more complicated in the fiction.
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Obscurity in writing is commonly an argument of darkness in the mind. The greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness.
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Whenever there's an interview with me, I might read it, but I don't read the comments because they're so hateful sometimes. When someone writes something nasty, I just think, "If that's your contribution to my day, I really don't need your impoliteness." I'm lucky that people are very cool with me and I get a lot of love. I appreciate that.
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I quite like being removed from the industry stuff so that when we're not on tour and we're writing, we're in a small room and you can't get out physically. I like that mental checking-out aspect - I think it's quite nice.
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I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.
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Writing about what happened to my brother and to my family was awful. It was hard to look back at how much suffering there was and at how certain bad situations were made worse by our decisions.
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If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.
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I believe enlightenment or revelation comes in daily life. I look for joy, the peace of action. You need action. I'd have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.
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A Poet, Naturalist, and Historian,Who left scarcely any style of writing untouched,And touched nothing that he did not adorn.
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This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.
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When I came into consciousness as a writer when I was in my early 20s, I just assumed that a writer did - a poet writer did everything all at once. I would write poetry, and while writing poetry I would also write work in the world - if I could get into the world.
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For graduate school I ended up going to the University of Iowa, which is, of course, the best graduate writing program in the country.
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The first writing of the human being was drawing, not writing.
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When I finally finished writing 'Sisters,' I started getting hired for lots of rewrites.
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Since I was a child, I've liked telling stories. Maybe because my father's a director, I grew up loving stories. I'm not good at spinning them at a dinner table because I do go on a bit, but I love writing them, and directing is just a way of editing the story.
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Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.
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I'm not doubtful that I am doing what I should be doing - writing for theater - and that I'm doing it in a way no one else does it. Whether anyone else is paying attention or anyone else cares, I'm still ambivalent about that. It's still an open question.
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I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.
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The amount of response I get, in both a negative and a positive context, is completely related to the amount of books I sell, I think. It seems to have nothing to do with what I'm writing, but what degree of success I'm perceived to have. It's really weird, especially since I spent so much of my life covering people who are famous. It's interesting to actually have it happen to me on some level.
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Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.
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I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.
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If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.
