Writing Quotes
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As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
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I'm proud that I've never stopped writing about being poor.
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I suppose, because I've been able to make a very good living writing books, that going out and finding another million dollars under the sea is not the fascination. The fascination is in finding the ship.
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For me, it's been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.
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You can't improv off of bad writing. Then you have to actually create your objective, which is really hard to do in an element without the skeleton to go off of.
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I write-down to speak-up.
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I'm one of those writers who can't talk about what they're working on. The entire four years I was writing 'House of Sand and Fog,' my wife never saw a word of it. I just have to keep it in the womb, and then everyone can have a crack at it.
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By writing this, knowing that there was a chance he'd read it, i was up to my old tricks. Was I not sending an open letter hoping for some kind of response, in return?
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I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
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I was extremely shy. And I simply didn't know how to go about it. It seemed a lot easier to write than to make films. All I needed was a pencil and a piece of paper, whereas filmmaking was something I had no access to.
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In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.
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The only people worth writing about are those about whom the last word cannot be said.
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I never considered I might make a career out of writing as I was going to school, so when I did turn my attentions that way, I was very ill prepared, having only what I read as a guide, and no formal training whatsoever. I credit that very ignorance with a great deal of my success.
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After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.
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The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before.
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I haven't stopped writing which is good. I'm scared to stop completely otherwise it might lead to stagnancy.
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I was just writing songs because, if a song shows up, you've gotta write it. I didn't know what to do with them. I didn't have any faith in my voice.
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I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it's much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!
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To write a blues song is to regiment riots and pluck gems from graves.
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Sometimes I worry I'm writing 'Fifty Shades of Grey' for teenagers, but I'm not.
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I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.
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Every artist wants an audience, and it's incredible to me how books take on a life of their own and reach people whom you could never meet. That's what got me interested in writing in the first place.
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I sometimes feel that my goal as a novelist would be to write a novel in which the language was so transparent that the reader would forget that language was the medium of understanding. Of course that's not possible, but it's some sort of idealized goal.
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Whenever we can make 25 words do the work of 50, we halve the area in which looseness and disorganization can flourish.
