Quotes About Writing

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

I'm rereading Jenny Offill's 'Dept. of Speculation.' I love it, and she's just a magician. Line by line and paragraph by paragraph, it's mesmerizing and so intricately plotted and so nimble.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

I have learned that it is far easier to write a speech about good advertising than it is to write a good ad.

After the Tiananmen Massacre, I felt compelled not only to continue writing but to actively resist the restrictions placed on freedom of speech. I set up the publishing company in Hong Kong, with offices in Shenzhen in mainland China, and managed to publish works of fiction, philosophy, and politics by unapproved authors.

Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.

Not being able to read and write music is not the same as being illiterate in speech and writing.

Russian is such a tough and complex language that I am happy enough to understand everything and read most things pretty well, but, without constant practice, my speech is not what I wish it was, and I would sooner write in crayon than write a letter in Russian.

Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means- speech, writing, or deed, whichever is more to the point - to accelerate revolutionary development.

Events don't happen because I write a speech. I am allowed to write a speech because events are going to happen.

The way we learn to write is the way we learn to talk: We listen to others and start mimicking speech, and that's how we come to become speakers. Writers you admire, you admire the way they plot, you admire the way they create a character, you admire the way they put a sentence together, those are the writers you should be reading.

I'm sure that everything you do contributes to the sort of novel that you write. A lot of actors have an understanding of drama and a good ear for dialogue and also the rhythm of speech. Similarly, my 16 years in radio drama has influenced me. You only have 45 minutes, or 7,000 words, to tell a story, so every scene has to have a point.

I think 'Cool Hand Luke' was probably the first movie in which I was aware of the writing as its own separate thing. It was that speech when the guy reads Paul Newman the riot act. The speech about going in the box.

All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.

If anything is scary about my writing, it's that it's the product of a very particular vision and doesn't reference common speech that heavily. By 'common speech,' I don't mean language as much as an agreed-on way of seeing, or a shorthand.

The only things I make money on are speeches and books.

I write all of my own speeches.

Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.

One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading.

Excessive speed and quantity are, like chattiness and digression, besetting sins of cyber-assisted authorship.

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.

I've never really felt comfortable co-writing. I usually go at my own speed, you know.

The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication.

The speed of the TV stuff vs. the self-imposed pace of novel writing has been a big adjustment, and going back and forth often feels like whiplash.