Writing Quotes
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It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry.
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So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!
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All writing is an act of self-exploration. Even a grocery list says something about you; how much more does a novel say?
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It is a lie to write in such way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary groups in the intellectual gazettes.
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Writing is a solitary activity, it requires isolation and silence.
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Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do
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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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Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing. ... There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any writing of mine dealing with this subject.
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When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits. Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real. Make haste to live. Oh, God, yes. Live. And write. With great haste.
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Don't write anything down, but save everything that anyone else writes down.
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I am 82 years old. I imagine that I will keep on writing as long as anyone wants to keep reading.
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I don't know necessarily that I would produce under my own company right now. Producing is not something that I'm thinking about. Directing is something that I will be doing very shortly, trying to figure out what to get my hands on. And I can't imagine writing a script and wanting to direct it and not having a producing credit, because I would want to have a big chunk of power on that end, if I wrote something.
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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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No doubt, there are those who believe that judges - and particularly dissenting judges - write to hear themselves say, as it were, 'I, I, I.' And no doubt, there are also those who believe that judges are, like Joan Didion, primarily engaged in the writing of fiction. I cannot agree with either of those propositions.
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I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.
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I'm of the school 'Write what you know.' You can educate yourself, but the best writing usually comes from the heart.
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I feel so disassociated from my writing - whether it's in book form or magazine - that I sometimes have a hard time believing that it's mine.
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I have been writing mainly fiction. Occasionally there will be a song that hangs around the truth a little more than the rest, but even with those I end up fudging the facts just to keep it from going stale.
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I realized that I really enjoy writing comedy, and how important comedy is when you feel like total crap.
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And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.
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Don't let anyone discourage you from writing. If you become a professional writer, there are plenty of editors, reviewers, critics, and book buyers to do that.
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I am very aware of the fact that it's highly unlikely anyone will write an article via their mobile phone. I've done it, but it's painful. And it's not just about the small keyboard and the small screen - though that's awful. It's the emotional experience of writing an article.
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In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.
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When the writing is going really well, whole days and weeks go by, and I suddenly realise I have all these unpaid bills and, my God, I haven't unpacked, and the suitcase has been sitting there for three weeks.
