Writing Quotes
-
It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.
-
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
-
Because I wake up late, my day is often short. I'm much more active in the evenings, during which I alternately read, write, needle-point, smoke, email, and despair over my decision last June to put my television and DVD player out on the street because I wasn't getting enough work done.
-
Could I write all, the world would turn to stone.
-
The business of writing is one of the four or five most private things in the world.
-
I keep recycling and repackaging music that I've done in the past, as though I can't write anymore. Like, okay, I'm done with that. But I need to kind of prod myself again into come on, Herbie, get off your duff and start writing some new music.
-
It was writing about music for NPR - connecting with music fans and experiencing a sense of community - that made me want to write songs again. I began to feel I was in my head too much about music, too analytical.
-
Write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?
-
If you like to tell stories and compose sentences, and if you work hard at being good at these things, then you are a writer even if you haven't published anything.
-
I began writing as an experimental writer.
-
The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.
-
Meg Ryan was nice [ in When Harry Met Sally] ... the writing was good ... but it was really kind of a boy's club, I mean, there was Bruno Kirby, Rob Reiner, Billy Crystal - talk about your testosterone trio!
-
A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.
-
My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.
-
I try to create new characters in each book I write. That's what makes writing fun and interesting for me.
-
Writing is like sex. You have to save your love for the love object. If you go around spouting about your idea, there'll be no "charge" left. You can't father children that way.
-
I never feel I'm standing on solid ground, and I do write with a certain kind of trembling fear.
-
You fail only if you stop writing.
-
I've had journals ever since I was really little. Sometimes I write poems and stuff, but for the most part I write down what happens to me during the day that I don't want to forget. So I have books filled with little things like that.
-
I loved writing the Spellman novels, but I never had any plan to only write in one genre.
-
For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.
-
It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.
-
There is the myth that writing books for children is easier than writing books for grownups, whereas we know that truly great books for children are works of genius, whether it's 'Alice in Wonderland' or the 'Gruffalo' or 'Northern Lights.' When it's a great book, it's a great book, whether it's for children or not.
-
I tend not to think about the reading public at all, or the business, when I'm writing.
