Writing Quotes
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The older I get, the more interest I have in writing other kinds of music.
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I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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Dreamt I died in Chicago next weekend (heart attack in my sleep). Need to write my will today.
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I've just finished a series of Olivia Manning novels. She's best known for two trilogies: Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy. The six novels are continuous and contain the same set of characters. They are based on Manning's experiences in Eastern Europe and Egypt during the Second World War. Each novel is a wonderful picture of the peculiar British expatriate culture and what was happening during the war. She's one of those brilliant women who write very well about domestic relationships. All the books are slim, and it's easy to gallop through them.
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You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.
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I find writing for children much easier. I don't mean it's less demanding - you've got to have a talent for it and you've got to work very hard - but you don't have to pull your guts out and lay them on the line in quite the same way as when you're writing for adults.
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You think you have some stable talent that will show no matter what you're writing, and if it doesn't seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can't imagine that moment when it suddenly will. Gradually, gradually you gain that confidence.
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I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.
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Writing is hard. That's why so few people stick to it and actually finish things. And why you have a right to be immensely proud when you finish something.
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Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word - life.
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A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery. Employers would rather not hire a lot of workers from the inner city. They feel people from the inner city are not job-ready, that the kids have been poorly educated, that they can't read, they can't write, they can't speak.
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It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.
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I only want to write. I don't care about directing really. I've tried it and it was fun, but it's not like I have to.
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The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.
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Writing is sometimes a balancing act between keeping things easily readable and being accurate.
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Early on in my career, I was often the only woman in the room, writing for shows like 'Late Night with David Letterman,' 'The Simpsons,' 'Newhart,' and 'Coach,' and sometimes I'd feel like I didn't belong.
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Install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.
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Either you've got the bug, or you haven't. There are many things I'd rather be doing than writing a book.
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Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.
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For stand-up comedians that go onstage and get to write and perform and direct, and do all these things, the allure of a television show is still there but if it doesn't offer a level of creative fulfillment, it's oddly unappealing.
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You know how sometimes you meet writers that are so full of themselves? They feel really proud that they wrote something . But what they don't understand - and I like to tell this to writers - is that writing is like fishing. It's just like fishing. If you don't fish that often, you're not going to catch that many fish.
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I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
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The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.
