Writing Quotes
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I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.
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Everything that a painter did or that a writer wrote was a part of his training and preparation for what he was to do.
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Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.
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Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
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I feel I'm discovering something new, a different rhythm, and I guess these rhythms have a lot to do with walking, too, but it's a longer trajectory now. I'm traveling greater distances with each sentence. But I don't write about walking that much anymore.
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Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.
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I think when people hear about a celebrity writing a book of any kind, the assumption is that it was dictated to a ghostwriter.
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The fun of writing established characters is that there's a rich mythology to draw from - you get to play with toys you loved as a kid.
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... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it. For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.
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The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
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As I wrote more I became more critical of myself and I think that you have to be your harshest judge. I don't ever believe that what I write is my best work. I always think that I can hone it. I can always think that I can make it a little bit better.
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When I was young I was only thinking of writing, and whatever was going on was unreal and comparatively unimportant.
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Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly every day.
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I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.
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I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.
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The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. . . . I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance - the revolt of the soul against the intellect.
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I'm convinced that we can write and live our own scripts more than most people will acknowledge. I also know the price that must be paid. It's a real struggle to do it. It requires visualization and affirmation. It involves living a life of integrity, starting with making and keeping promises, until the whole human personality the senses, the thinking, the feeling, and the intuition are ultimately integrated and harmonized.
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I write out of revenge.
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I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage.
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Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way.
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It's fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats as I am most of the time — for jittery people.
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You have to be very clear with yourself about how you're going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don't spend it surfing the Internet or reading.
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I suppose I like certainty as much as anyone else, but I also feel that the hidden costs are high, that we pay a heavy price for our convictions. This is a human issue as well as a writing issue - at least in the personal essay as I practice it. Any real essayist knows that certainty is an editorial decision, arrived at not through conviction but through suppression, the denial of a whole range of possibilities, of alternatives that we jettison, sometimes necessarily, in order to steady the ship.
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A writer lives, at best, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all.
