Quotes About Writing

You simply couldn't make a living as an author if New Zealand was your only market.

The only way to learn writing is by writing. Talent, as charming as it sounds, amounts to no more than 12 per cent of the process. Work is 80 per cent. The remaining 8 per cent is 'luck' or 'zeitgeist' - in short, things that are not in our hands.

I consider writing practice a true Zen practice because it all comes back at you. You can't fool anyone because it's on the page.

Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it's hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.

There is a tradition that sees journalism as the dark side of literature, with book writing at its zenith. I don't agree. I think that all written work constitutes literature, even graffiti.

When I did the zero draft for Six of Crows,' it was a very organic process.

Those writers that have zero say in their movie adaptations have zero say because they sell it. If you don't sell it, and you do it yourself, and you wait until the screenplay is ready, you don't have to worry about that.

After preliminary research, I zero in on an idea, and then I spend at least four months exploring the topic and in plot-building. I jot down every single detail of the plot as bullet points per chapter, and only when the skeleton is complete do I start writing.

I went to graduate school with zero expectation. I kind of backed into it. I wanted to go back to school because I felt gaps in my literary background. I studied mostly twentieth-century English literature in college, so I thought, 'Maybe I'll go back for my writing.'

Writers aren't in competition with one another. It isn't a zero sum game. If you have a good book, a good cover, a good product description, and a low price, you can sell well.

When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.

I actually wrote my first zombie book way before I got the job on 'Saturday Night Live.'

I was reading a lot of Jacques Derrida at the time, writing 'Beth.' He actually talked about zombies.

When you're writing, you're in a totally different zone... I can start a difficult poem and look up at the clock and see to my astonishment that three hours have passed.

There have been some brilliant and very successful standalone books that work in themselves and also seem to refresh a series. Anyone who writes a series lives in fear of it becoming stale, so you do whatever you can to keep it fresh - although it does feel a bit nerve-racking to write outside of your comfort zone.

In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate.

I fundamentally believe that no one can teach you how to write - finding out how to write a story is part of the process of creating a story - but you can really learn through exposure to different writing, to different art forms, to different modes of storytelling, and with mentors who are able to get you to step outside your comfort zone.

You have to keep challenging yourself. I've always tried to do that, and I'm not saying I've always been successful. Maybe I've rewritten the same song; it's inevitable, but I've always been mindful of taking the writing somewhere else. You can't stick in your little comfort zone.

I guess my comfort zone as a writer is diametrically opposed to my comfort zone as a human being.

In older science fiction stories, they had to rely on storytelling as opposed to spectacle. The old run of the 'Twilight Zone,' the star was the writing and the storytelling, and the characters and the twists and the cleverness in the setup and payoff and execution.

I wish I was the kind of writer who would go to a war zone and write about something that's meaningful and important to people, but that's not my area of coverage.

That's the best thing about writing, when you're in that zone, you're porous, ready to absorb the solution.

I used to write in school a lot; I always liked it and used to write on my own, comic books, come up with alternate story lines to the stuff I watched and read, a lot of books and TV, episodes of 'Twilight Zone.' I didn't think about it.

As for the zone, I always find the zone immediately after I am sure I will never ever find the zone again because it has left me for some other, better writer.