Writing Quotes
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To write, you must first belong to yourself.
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I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
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What could be more exciting when the writing is going well and things are falling into place? It's just like riding a fabulous wave for a surfer. There's no better place to be.
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Nobody writes a book to get rich. It's like speaking.
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I'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.
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It is indeed acceptable practice to sometimes split an infinitive. If infinitive-splitting makes available just the shade of meaning you desire or if avoiding the separation creates a confusing ambiguity or patent artificiality, you are entitled to happily go ahead and split!
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I deal with emotional pain through therapy, writing, therapy in music. I think emotional pain is best dealt with when you use art to express it.
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I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.
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When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.
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Some people see me as dissecting my characters in some kind of heartless, coldblooded, analytical way, when in truth making these movies is a passionate, intensely emotional experience for me. I'm detached from the characters only to the degree that I have to be in order to write honestly about them.
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When you write, you're supposed to go stand somewhere else for a while, see things from a perspective that's not in line with your own reflexive truths.
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Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.
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I write both at home and at coffee shops, and I have a terrible work ethic - I have a tendency to write most of my books right before the deadline. I'm trying to work on that, but so far, I'm not getting any more organized.
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The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.
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A piece of writing is like a piece of magic. You create something out of nothing.
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Early on in the writing, there is often a sentence that pins down a character for me.
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Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.
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I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I’m writing. I don’t see anything else, I don’t think about anything else.
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Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
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I perform well under pressure, but I don't write well under pressure, because for me, writing is truly about emotion that you can't put a timeline on.
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I'm totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.
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We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us.
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The only way to raise the quality of writing in school is to create, share, and celebrate the specific criteria for that quality with everybody on a regular basis.
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You can't expect someone who has been in prison his whole entire life to turn around and become a sweet guy who writes books and walks his dog and has a normal life.
