Quotes About Writing

I try to write in the mornings, as soon as I'm up and caffeinated, and to stay in the chair as long as I can be productive.

I started to write as a child as soon as I could read, or even before, when my mother read me Beatrix Potter at bedtime. Writing seemed to me to be the only sensible way to live and be happy.

I started writing about New York as soon as I arrived. I was 19. I used to write short stories and send them out.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

I did a lot of writing for a lot of different kinds of bands that I was in and out of during those five years and that left me with a little body of songs that I liked better when I played alone, so I ended up going out solo and very soon made my first album.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

Being able to write an idea down succinctly doesn't make that idea any better than one which rambles on a bit. It just comes to the point sooner.

College had little effect on me. I'd have been the same writer if I'd gone to MIT, except I'd have flunked out sooner.

I sing because it soothes me, and I write because I want to let others know that they're not alone with their problems.

When I'm in heavy-duty writing mode, there's something great about reading a series. Soothing, but not distracting too much.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

For a long time, Nella Larsen was the mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance. In the late 1920s, she published two sophisticated novels, 'Quicksand' and 'Passing,' and then her writing life came to an end. She died in obscurity in 1964.

I write what I call 'novels of consolation' for people who are bright and sophisticated.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

I'm not good enough to write about my friends, who are all brilliant and sophisticated.

I think screenwriting gave me more of an affinity for plot - my first novel, 'Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,' doesn't have a very sophisticated roadmap. But screenwriting required me to learn a higher level of plottiness, and I tried to bring that to 'The Haters.'

Hebrew is my first language, so it's really the most personal and the most simple. When I write in Hebrew, I don't look for sophistication in music; it's just pure emotion that comes out.

There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.

A lot of people have trouble with their second novel - the dreaded sophomore jinx. I wrote three books in between the two novels, and they just weren't very good.

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

When I'm putting a story together, I generally know the ending and a couple of the points halfway through, and I've got sort of an idea about the beginning, and although I do write the story one sentence at a time, when I'm thinking it up, I'm thinking it up all at once.

I had sort of given up on conventional journalism. I found it far too restrictive.

Once I got my life sorted and started to get healthy, then I was able to focus on writing.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.