Writing Quotes
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Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.
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And I wanted to do a movie Moonrise Kingdom about a childhood romance - a very powerful experience of childhood romance. About what it's like to just be blindsided, when you're in fifth grade or sixth grade, by these kinds of feelings. Along the way, I sort of mixed in some interest in "young adult fantasy" writing.
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I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.
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It's an easier task to imagine someone's interior world when you feel quite distanced from them. In the same way that I find writing about Australia easier than writing about the UK because I don't have the reality of it in front of me to get me bogged down in trying to be exact.
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I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
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When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.
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We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
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I believe the term "blog" means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume.
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I think anytime you're writing to the middle grades, you're writing to young readers who are trapped in a number of ways between two worlds: between childhood and adulthood, between their friends and their parents.
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Kids are naturally inventive and curious and creative, but most adults have had that beaten out of them. Writing is a form of play; you have to get rid of all those internal censors that we adults have, the things that say, 'Don't go there, that's not allowed.
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Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).
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Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone.
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The pen will never be able to move fast enough to write down every word discovered in the space of memory. Some things have been lost forever, other things will perhaps be remembered again, and still other things have been lost and found and lost again. There is no way to be sure of any this.
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Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.
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But being able to talk to so many patients from so many walks of life gives a tremendous window into people's lives. This is not to say I want to write about individual patients, but I think that after listening to the concerns of people who are so different from me, I can more realistically portray characters who are so different from me. Writing Character Thinking Giving People
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You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
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It's a weird job because making music or writing a song is a personal thing... and it kind of has to be. You can always tell when people are faking.
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To write, you must first belong to yourself.
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My life wasn't always smooth sailing. Two members of my family were diagnosed with cancer, so I spent a lot of time in hospitals and giving home care. Several close friends died. I fell in love with the wrong person. And I was working all the time but still sliding into debt. My life wasn't anything like I thought it would be. And then I got in a bad car accident. I walked away, but it was like a splash of cold water. The next day, I started writing Twelve Lives. Sometimes, when you're backed into a corner and have nothing to lose, it's a great place to write from.
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I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own instincts, and trust them.
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Where would you like to go, what would you really like to do with your life? See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot at a few times in a dark alley on a Morrocan midnight. Love a beautiful woman.
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The best kind of art or writing holds up a mirror to society.
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Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.
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Thinking about writing as an act of celebration is sometimes a helpful framework for me. It allows me to prioritize what I want to call attention to and what I want others to know about me. It makes me ask: What is worth celebrating?
