Writing Quotes
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The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.
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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 wanted to be as invisible as possible as an artist. I wanted to differentiate between myself and who I'm writing about.
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I never know when I sit down, just what I am going to write. I make no plan; it just comes, and I don't know where it comes from.
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To me there is no such thing as creative writing. It's either good writing, whatever the subject, or it's not creative.
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A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
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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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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?
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I believe it is important that we Japanese write a constitution for ourselves that would reflect the shape of the country we consider desirable in the 21st century.
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Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.
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I don't think I ever had a morning where I woke up and said I'm going to be a professional poet. I know I've always loved poetry, I've always loved writing poetry and I've always loved sharing poetry. I've also always known that I wanted that to somehow be a very large part of my life and I'm very fortunate that it's such a large part of my life.
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You can be far more challenging, articulate and intelligent writing for television than you can writing for the cinema.
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I have ten thousand memories of myself writing alone in basements, bizarre servant quarters, cemeteries, deserted fountains, the band van, and other awkward settings.
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It's a mystical quality of music, that music isn't really concrete, and it's communicating abstractions about imaginary worlds. At least, my music's like that. It's not real. It's unreal, it's all fabrication. To write a song about Obama would suddenly break the spell.
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I'll be writing essays long after I've stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I'm capable of as a novelist, I'm more limited.
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I don't listen to music for fun. I ain't got enough time for fun! I'm always busy writing my own music. I don't try to compete or see what other people are doing.
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Good God! This man should be writing dime novels.
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I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.
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To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.
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I don't have to write about the future. For most people, the present is enough like the future to be pretty scary.
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I've been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can't really say where the desire came from; I've always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down!
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I never sit down and write. I just sorta let things form in my brain.
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After the first shock of recognition - a sudden sense of "this is what I'm going to write" - the novel starts to breed by itself; the process goes on solely in the mind, not on paper. I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer, but I prefer to wait until what is loosely called inspiration has completed the task for me.
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I tend to write from a personal place, and most of the time when I'm writing by myself, it's coming from something I've experienced.
