Quotes About Writing

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

You want an audience. If you didn't, you wouldn't be a writer. The biggest motivation to write is the knowledge that someone will read it.

You have a different, much more intimate relationship with the characters in a novel than when writing a screenplay. You're able to get inside their heads in a different way. You can understand their motivations more.

The music I listen to while writing is really scene-specific. It's just a great motivator, a way to put myself in the mood.

If you want to write, start writing now in your own home town and write every day as hard as you can; do not think you have to go to Paris and wait for inspiration to strike.

All serious work in fiction is autobiographical.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

Vanità scriverà qui riposa il vecchio Jack.

Perfume the literature you write with only the finest inks, for literature works are luscious girls, and ink their precious perfume. —Arabic saying ~800 AD

Writing doesn't get easier with experience. The more you know, the harder it is to write.

It occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

The story' Sanders would say the whole tone, man, you're wrecking it. Tone?' The sound. You need to get a consitent sound, like slow or fast, funny or sad. All these disgressions, they just screw up your story's sound. Stick to what happened.

the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.

Write your letter, I'll take it – and I'll return with this atheist's jawbone as quickly as I'm able.

A writer absolutely has to make his villains clever and competent. It's no fun—and no challenge—for the heroes to get out of trouble without sweating about it first.

Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.

There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

The life that produces writing can't be written about. Is is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind's business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.

The Outlaws generally write as well as the bankers, though more briefly. Some writers flourish like opportunistic weeds by hiding among the citizens, others by toughing it out in some sort of desert or another.

The stories you have to write will always make someone hate your guts. If they don't you're just producing words.

To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic. These essays are about that magic — which is sometimes perilous, sometimes infectious, sometimes fragile, sometimes failed, sometimes infuriating, sometimes triumphant, and sometimes tragic. I went up there. I wrote. I tried to see.

It's going to be hard writing for you. I can't dip into the usual well. I have to learn to write the way I used to like to write, not the way I'm paid to write

And if I've got to die, I want to die an editor.

Which is why I started writing this, I suppose - that and the money Dexitheus offered me, of course, and the prospect of something to do over the winter. Dear God, I really am starting to ramble now, aren't I? I'd better get on with the story, before I completely lose touch with reality.