Quotes About Writing

Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

If you're living in your time, you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Writing is art.... it reflects a creative process of experimentation and self-expression.

writing for a couple of months after a woman accused her of committing the grammatical sin

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.

Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.

You're smiling. But you must know yourself, since you are a literary person, that the work of fiction is always a form of recovery of the past, even if that past has to be falsified to seem real. The act of recalling the past in what we write doesn't mean knowing the way it really was, but rather becoming the master of memories as they burn in the perilous instant of creation.

This is the challenge of writing. You have to be very emotionally engaged in what youre doing, or it comes out flat. You cant fake your way through this.

You're too busy writing the next book to worry about Googling yourself all the time.

Since I started, like, 200 years ago, I've always wanted to direct and write. But I've been so busy - and fortunate and lucky - as an actor.

I just butcher a book. Everything I underline I assume is important to me.

I'm happy to work until I'm 70 if I'm able to. Actually, I'm happy to keep writing as long as people keep buying my books.

I was someone who wanted to be a writer but who wasn't writing. I was someone buying books on writing. I was someone telling people that I was writer. But I was not writing.

I didn't actually get along with my dad when I was growing up, so by the time I was in my 20s, I didn't think I was going to be a writer.

I number my drafts, and by the time a book is done, I'll have 75 or 80 drafts of some sections.

You look at shows on cable, and there's a lot of smart writing out there.

I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.

It was a romantic dream to be a writer. It seemed like a calling.

Writing is a very calming thing for me.