Quotes About Writing

Leaving New York and friends is tough, and there are things about it I still really miss. But Montana is a great place to write.

I love writing, and I am never as happy as when I have a week, a month - three months - with nothing to do but write.

In Beijing, the joke among hacks is that, after the drive in from the airport, you are ready to write a column; after a month, you feel the stirrings of an idea-book; but after a year, you struggle to write anything at all, because you've finally discovered just how much you don't know.

It's my job to write the best book I can each month and hand my scripts in. Everything else is beyond my control.

My experience of fiction was, in the beginning, so exploratory. I wasn't sitting down to a desk at Yaddo with a month, thinking I have to have a draft of a novel.

It's such a risk to write a novel that it's easy to become conservative - you're spending what would be, for me, a couple of years of my life on a single idea. Which is maybe one of the reasons I write stories - if it doesn't work, you've only lost a month.

I'm really happy when I'm actively creating things. When I'm frustrated and not excited, it's because I haven't written anything in a month or so.

The fastest I've ever done a book is a 112,000-word book in about a month.

I'm definitely not a monthly guy. Probably never will be. I'm simply in awe of the guys who do monthly books well... hell, in awe of people who do monthlies period.

I belong to the Boston Biographers Group - and get my monthly 'fix' from them. Where else can I sit down for two hours with people who understand the challenge I face, daily, as a life-chronicler?

I'm not the monthly comic guy, and I never really have been.

When the babies were very young, I found it difficult to write. I told myself each time that it would be different, I was used to it now, but with every child, for the first four months, I would accomplish nothing.

We sit in a room for months trying to think of funny things.

Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.

I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week.

I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter.

I'm very finicky about when I'm in the right mood to write. So most days, I find some excuse not to do anything.

When I'm writing, my mood is very good - and I love life.

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head - 'There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn't in the mood for it' - and I knew I had a novel.

Some writers sit down every day for two or three hours, at least, to write, whether they are in the mood or not. Others wait for inspiration.

Songs of different moods are like keys, which help me enter the world of my book's characters.

I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.

I definitely in filmmaking more and more find writing and directing a means to harvest material for editing. It's all about editing.

Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.