Quotes About Writing

I teach at Duke, and I have students who are all of twenty who want to write memoirs, and you know it's all pretty interesting stuff, but a lot of them lack gravitas, you know.

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

For about twenty years, if I managed to write ten or twelve poems in a year; I considered that a pretty successful year, but I wrote 'The Beforelife' within a year.

At the age of twenty, having published nothing and having had little guidance in my reading, I decided that I wanted to write.

Who was Jesus anyway? After twenty centuries, there is not much anyone can agree on. The four canonical gospels don't measure up to modern standards of biographical writing, and - outside of this material - there is precious little contemporary evidence, apart from a few glancing mentions of Jesus or the movement centered on him.

I lasted seven years as a journalist, and I've been doing comedy for twenty years.

I always wanted to write. But honestly I'm glad I didn't do it back when I was twenty-five or so, when it's now clear to me that I was a very poor writer and could've ruined my career before it even started.

I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.

'The Immigrant Story,' which took me about twenty-five years to write, was a very simple story, but I couldn't think of how to tell it. Then twenty years after I started it, I found this one page and realized it was going to be the story. That's the only way you get it sometimes.

You don't sit there at twenty-five, unpublished, inexperienced, and respond to Susan Sontag's editorial suggestions like a little snot, rejecting every one of them. But it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn't admire Susan's own fiction.

I am an author, and like many in my profession, I am also a traveling salesman, going all over in an attempt to persuade people to spend twenty-five dollars on a hardcover book by me.

I gave up writing for seven years (very biblical) and picked it up again, still clueless and still seeking the exotic, when I was twenty-one.

I was eighteen when I wrote my first book, and I can't remember what it was called. I have no idea where the manuscript is - I lost it when I was twenty-one.

That's correct, I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn't write.

Everybody I know is writing plays twice a year. It's sort of making me feel I am not up to much.

Twice a year, I take myself off to a self-imposed 'writer's retreat', staying at a small inn or on a friend's farm, where I am all alone and do nothing other than write.

David Milch, twice I got lectures from him about the theory of writing. I told my wife one night when I got home, 'I feel like I'm being paid to sit at the feet of Aristotle.'

I have said with as much sincerity as I can muster that if I were thrown into a dungeon with a sentence of one hundred years, with my only company being an illiterate guard who came twice a day with meals but who never spoke, I would still write - on coarse toilet paper in the dark if I could spare it.

I went to school in Gainesville because it was a huge punk and folk town. So I went to class twice a week, and then I went to shows and wrote. I did a lot of music writing before I actually started playing music.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

I've had some success at writing and directing, and I like it. It's infinitely more creative than just acting, and I have things I want to say and do.

I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.

I'm a fan myself, so I try to write the kind of comics I want to read.

It actually took me 20 years to want to write about my youth. I was definitely always a little intimidated about writing about that part of my life.