Quotes About Writing

If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.

Writing a novel is so hard, and there are so many problems that the last thing you're thinking about is adapting this mess you have on your hands as a movie. You just want to get it to work as a novel. That's your main focus.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

The more light hearted I write about that, the better the message gets through.

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.

If you're a writer, the insight of other writers - if there's some kind of Holy Grail message on how to deal with writer's block or how to deal with any problem that can come up - whether you're writing about yourself or a group of people, I find that very interesting.

I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80,000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.

Writers of color are given certain messages - explicit or implicit - about what they're allowed to write about or what will be successful if they write about it. And white writers are given another set of implicit and, sometimes, explicit messages.

Part of the fun of writing is having messages. Without them, it's all gunfights and car chases, and none of it means anything.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

A sense of play is important when I'm writing, and so messing around with, say, a magic routine can feel like play, at least initially.

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

I write about messy relationships, and they put pastel covers on them, but I can't complain.

It's different from music because music is like going deep down into soul, like scooping out all the difficult, beautiful, messy stuff and putting it into songs. Writing is more like playing for me.

In the U.K. and Ireland, crowd-work is a big thing. It shows you how funny someone would be if you met them off-stage. Americans don't care if you're funny off-stage. They want to see the writing; they want to see the work you did.

I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.

I am a consummate metaphor addict.

I was in love with metaphors and similes and alliteration, just the play on the words. I was fascinated with that concept.

That's what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!

As a writer given to the old formalities of rhyme and meter, I sometimes feel endangered these days.

One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.

Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.

I'm the last person who would end up doing something that needs meticulous compilation of facts. It's totally against my character. I live by impulse. I'm totally ill-suited to writing history books.

When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called 'Aztec,' I had to make a deliberate effort to ignore a lot of the 'typically Mexican landscape' around me - banana and citrus groves, roses and carnations, burros and toros - because they did not exist in Mexico in the 15th century, the time of my book.