Quotes About Writing

I'm on Twitter a lot of the day because I really like Twitter. It's great for jokes. But when I'm writing, I can't do anything else. I can't even listen to music. I just have to write, and then I can do something else. I can't multitask.

I set a goal for myself everyday when I write - 10 pages a day - and it's much harder because I'm too dumb to turn off my Twitter and everything so it's always on and it's a real distraction. It's a major distraction.

I don't Twitter or blog. I'm bad at small talk, and don't have good 'chat'. Talk to me about publishing, and I can go on for hours.

When I worked in theater, I was always writing things on Post-it Notes and sticking them on screens or desks. Twitter has given me a way of continuing to post those notes, only a lot of other people see them, too.

Twitter taught me how to become better at writing jokes because it forces you to chip away at all the extraneous words.

I'm not trying to be a poet on Twitter; I'm trying to be aware of the fact that a very simple sentence, well written, can have a very moving effect without that person knowing why. There's a deep genetic part of you that somehow, even without your permission, recognizes good language when it arrives.

The international limit on mobile texting, or SMS, is 160 characters. We wanted Twitter to be entirely readable and writable on every single one of the over five billion mobile phones on this planet, because they all have SMS built in. So we said it has to be within 160 characters, all the tweets.

When I was first writing 'Feed' - which was the first book I published as Mira - I talked about it very openly on my blog, on Twitter, that I was writing this book, and it wasn't until after it was sold that I said 'Mira Grant' wrote this book. And the reason there was really purely marketing-based.

I do see an interest in writing for Twitter.

I started doing a Twitter feed when my father was dying. I was very distracted, preoccupied. It was upsetting.

The pressure used to wear on me. I was on Twitter a couple years ago, and I couldn't handle it all that well. Don't get me wrong, because 90% of the feedback you get is fantastic.

My dream of dreams is to write Broadway musicals. All of this Twitter and TV writing is just a day job.

To develop your own voice, you have to keep writing a ton, and this is something where I think Twitter is helpful. I use it to write a ton of jokes. You have to write a ton of bad stuff before you know what you're good at. And that's what some people I think have trouble with, the thought of getting past the bad stuff.

A short story is the shortest distance between two points; a novel is the scenic route.

I draft on the computer. I have a really giant screen that attaches to my laptop, and then I have a humongous digital drawing tablet called a Cintiq. It sits at all different angles, and it's so big that it would take two people to move it.

You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.

I think with every writer there are two people there.

When you're an author, you're always two people. Jasper the writer is different from Jasper the person at home.

The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny, you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.

'Rolling Stone' had started something called 'Outside,' and since I was one of two people in the office that liked going outside, I was pegged to work on it. The concept of the magazine was simple: literate writing about the out-of-doors. I jumped at the opportunity.

There's this whole thing of being two people. You are the person you want to be - the writer - and then there's this weird other life of going on tour and talking about the writing. And that really is weird.

Writing with a partner is, in some ways, an easy but odd process. Two people come into a room and look to each other for motivation. One might not be in the right mood at any given moment. And somehow, you begin; somehow, out of your exchange of thoughts, something engages both of you, and the process of collaboration begins.

I'd been in journalism about two weeks when I realized I would do just about anything to avoid writing, and over the years, I have.

I wrote the text of the resignation. I cannot say with precision when, but at the most two weeks before. I wrote it in Latin because something so important you do in Latin. Furthermore, Latin is a language in which I know well how to write in a more appropriate way.