Writing Quotes
-
You have to constantly arrange yourself around them, and that can take up a lot of energy. I mean, you don't go, "Why don't you cook dinner tonight, dear, for a change, instead of writing a great song?" I loved what [Paul Simon] did with words. But I wanted to do some more of that, too.
-
You fail only if you stop writing.
-
A lot of my own relatives didn't get to go to school because we were mountain people. You have to get out and work and help feed the family. My own dad couldn't read and write. And my dad was very proud of me.
-
I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.
-
I've always had a very developed superego. I also had a very powerful id, but there was no ego in the middle. So writing was always like letters sent from the id to the superego, saying, "What's going on here?" What I loved about writing was that I was totally weightless. I was amazed at the fact that I could be myself without being afraid that anyone would get hurt.
-
When I read, I hear what's on the page. I don't know whose voice it is, but some voice is reading to me, and when I write my own stories, I hear it, too.
-
I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I’m trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.
-
It was like they waited to tell each other things that had never been told before. What she had to say was terrible and afraid. But what he would tell her was so true that it would make everything all right. Maybe it was a thing that could not be spoken with words or writing. Maybe he would have to let her understand this in a different way. That was the feeling she had with him.
-
Too many people write books because they want to be a New York Times best-seller. They want the glory and the fame.
-
I don't like to read things that people write about me. I'd rather read what kids have to say about me, because it's not their profession to do that.
-
I am never happy when I finish a book. I always start feeling good, and then I get to about Page 75 and start losing momentum - and I kind of pull it together at the end, but by then I think it's just all over. It's become almost a running joke among my agent and my editor - I always say that, so they don't take me seriously anymore.
-
Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.
-
If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
-
Before I had published anything, I still hung out with people who liked to write. None of us had published, so there was no talk about the business, and there was probably a lot more angsty talk back then. But these days maybe there are some more laments about the culture, but I would say no.
-
Writing is the only thing in my life that doesn't get easier. It just doesn't.
-
There will never be another now - I'll make the most of today. There will never be another me - I'll make the most of myself.
-
I love to talk with children. I try to visit schools but it's hard for me to travel when I'm trying to write. Some authors are able to do both.
-
Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.
-
Writing is very castrating in the moment. Fiction in general, it has no function, nobody asks for it.
-
What's really good is that there are people making stories and writing them and the vast majority never see the light of day and it doesn't matter a fig.
-
If you're not engaged in the writing and it doesn't grab you then you just don't want to do it.
-
If you're not writing your own story, you're a character in someone else's.
-
I think what I've recognized over the years is that I'm very, very bingey, extremely bingey when it comes to writing.
-
When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
