Quotes About Writing

The decision to write full-time meant I couldn't afford to buy a house. A friend kindly offered me the use of his apartment in a thirty-six-story building full of newlywed couples in the southern area of Jakarta. I didn't like my working space at first, but the scenery and everything going on outside have worked their magic on me.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

I haven't scoured Dixie out of my voice. But I don't think that the books that I have written... have really in any way been Southern in character.

My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.

I think often people don't realize the great diversity of Southern writing because in their minds, if you're not from the South, it can seem regional and small, and of course that's not the case at all when you start to read the work.

The earliest known writing probably emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago, but for most of recorded history, reading and writing remained among the most elite human activities: the province of monarchs, priests and nobles who reserved for themselves the privilege of lasting words.

I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.

Journalism: an ability to meet the challenge of filling the space.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and 'live' with the characters.

My writing is called exotic or avant-garde because I write about rural places. Has it really come to this, that if you write about the country you are avant-garde? How did this happen? Modern agriculture and spaces are still so relevant.

Whether it's golf or writing, you have friends, and then you have 'friends' friends. Friends who are like family. I can count my close friends on two hands, which is good, I think. That's a lot. Some are at home in Spain, others are elsewhere, and some are in golf.

There is no loss bigger than losing your manuscript, not even love.

Wondering and writing constitute positive madness.

I write because I love. I love because I write.

Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself.

We, writers & poets, have a big problem. We swim too deep inside life, also in shallow waters, and then we end touching the sand!

I write about romance and passion to savour love twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

If you're dating a writer and they don't write about you — whether it's good or bad — then they don't love you. They just don't. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Whenever you are depressed, write your signature on a paper and write and write finally you ll have pain in you hand than your mind.

An author's job is to make you aware of your feelings while you continue to feel them.