Quotes About Writing

I work in a small study on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn - it's about 75 square feet, 11 taken up by book shelves along one wall.

After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.

People like Pete Peterson, the former secretary of commerce and Blackstone and titan of Wall Street, etc., has been writing books for years about the debt and deficit.

It's easier to write about what you know. I wouldn't write about a Wall Street broker, for example.

I didn't leave Wall Street because the work was against my nature - I do have a pretty good head for numbers. I left because I had this love for writing.

In books, you can just wallow in dialogue, and you can just wallow in written words. In screenplays, every line has to serve the purpose of the line that's implied before it and the line that's implied after it. Maybe five lines have to do the work of fifty lines.

Every time I'm feeling anxious, I go to my little meditation corner in my room and write down whatever I'm feeling. If I'm feeling terrible, I write that I'm feeling terrible and I accept that and I keep going, but I'm not going to wallow in that moment.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

Working on 'The Larry Sanders Show,' everything was there on the paper and in the room and within the four walls when all of us were together. It was just all there.

Growing up, my height was faithfully tracked from infancy to my late teens on the door frame of my mom's office - the only place in my family's home in Toronto where writing on the walls was encouraged.

Writing novels is largely about endurance and patience. I take a lot of breaks, hit walls, and go do something else while I think things through. But I do it every day, and I try to treat it as a job, something that is not dictated by whimsy or muses.

Ever since I was a girl, I have written about one to five pages every day - on napkins, on scrap paper, in notebooks and tablets, on the walls in my room as a teenager, and in orange paint on the cheap white plastic blinds in my room.

My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.

I have read books that are so cliched and lazy, my eyes have bled. But I also have read books marketed under the chick-lit umbrella that are so honest, clever and gritty that I've wanted to give up writing and paint walls instead.

I am a bit of a head-in-the-sand person as concerns things happening beyond the walls of my study. And I don't feel particularly guilty about that. I figure that my primary job is producing the very best stories I am capable of writing, and that is what I concentrate upon doing. That is within my control.

I rise near dawn, make a strong cup of coffee, wander to my desk and come fully awake by reading something written the day before.

I wander around online, but until I hit my daily word count, I only leave my desk to make some tea, eat, or to answer the door. At 7 P.M., I give up and spend the rest of the evening catching up with the news.

I love being a mom. But there's a certain kind of tedium to your life when your kid is young. Writing allows you to wander when your kid is napping in a crib ten feet away. So that's the great joy of writing fiction for me.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair, writing, smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

The stories are there first, and they come from my experiences wandering around in the world. They will resonate into bigger things, forces sweeping the planet, themes and archetypes, but I'm not smart enough to have lucid integration of all that in my head as I'm writing.

I've never written a movie, I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on, and that feels like enough of a job for me.

For me, it's actually really hard to write about my real experience. Like to do a Taylor Swift. You know what I mean? It's so brave to actually write about things that happened and things you wanna get off your chest, but I'm not really there yet.

When I was a kid. I started writing when I was 13. I got my first electric guitar when I was 13, but I'd always been singing. I had my first little acoustic when I was six. But I started being in bands when I was 13. Crappy rock bands, avant-garde things where we'd, like, 'wanna go against the norm, man.'

I think I always wanna write comedy because that's what feels truest to me; it feels closest to life as I know it, so that's what I want to reproduce.