Quotes About Writing

If your characters are two-dimensional and your plot uncompelling, it won't matter how incredibly detailed and believable your fantasy world might be.

Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It's just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time.

When I'm writing, I won't know whodunnit until maybe two thirds of the way through. Until then, I know as little as my detective. I just make it up as I go along. It's nerve-wracking, actually. You'll be half through and not know your conclusion. You worry one of these days the ending won't come. I'll be left with only two-thirds of a novel.

I write like a two-year-old, and I can't spell.

I am the luckiest old broad on two feet if the truth were known. It's - but it all goes back to 'Mary Tyler Moore,' 'Golden Girls,' all those - actors love to take the credit. We couldn't do it without the writers.

Headline writing is tough because often times you are given a predetermined number of spaces and words depending on the layout and the type of the story.

I used to work as a logger, which is the lowest of the low, you just had to type up what happens.

I'm not the type of guy who's funny in the room. I'm the guy who's funny late at night on a computer, trying to construct jokes.

You can type things on the Internet. You can have no credentials in any area and just get on your smart phone and write whatever you want.

I have a desk that I can raise or lower according to the state of my aching back. Sometimes I stand at it, and sometimes I have it high up to write at and sometimes a bit lower to type.

I immerse myself in everything I write; I feel what my characters do. I suffer with them. I cry as I type, sometimes to the point that I can't see the screen.

I happen to write by hand. I don't even type.

When writing comedy, you have to have the confidence to believe that there is only one type of relationship in the world, and we are all having it, that all men behave in the same way and so do all women.

In my early writing, all of my characters were exactly the same person. They all spoke the same, made the same types of jokes, reacted the same, etc. I think they were all just me in disguise.

I like writing different types of music. I like writing Christian music. I like collaborating with Christian artists. We have a Christian following. I love writing kids' music.

Certainly, there is a tendency to lump women who write similar types of books together, and it's not just in crime, is it? Women's fiction is supposedly a whole genre of itself. There's no male equivalent.

As with all types of writing, fantastical fiction depends on the same basic rules.

You can't write my types of books without hurting someone.

I just sit at a typewriter and curse a bit.

You can do without a woman but not a typewriter.

I go through periods where I work a great deal at all hours of the day whenever I am around a typewriter, and then I go through spells where I don't do anything. I just sort of have lunch - all day. I never have been able to stick to a schedule. I work when there is something due or when I am really excited about a piece.

I had a little portable typewriter. I call it my Harlem Literary Fellowship.

If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.

I don't do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.