Quotes About Writing

One mistake with beginners in writing is, that they think it important to spin out something long. It is a great deal better not to write more than a page or two, unless you have something to say, and can write it correctly.

I write in coffee shops, libraries, parks, museums. I get antsy and then get on my bike and go someplace else, letting the ideas spin around in my head as I dodge taxis.

It's so, so awful for my entire body and my spine and my hands, and I have a perfectly good desk to write at, but I don't care. I love writing in bed.

My mother wrote a couple of romances when I was a kid, and I always saw books in our bookshelf with 'Schroeder' on the spine.

My father was prolific when it came to writing: day-timers, journals. He wrote on pieces of loose-leaf paper that he held on to, and he wrote in spiral notebooks.

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

If you're writing anything decent, it's in you, it's your spirit coming out. If it's not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it's not a good song done with any conviction.

The Spirit communicating to your spirit is the most effective and fundamental of communications. Write it down. As you write down impressions of the Spirit, more are given.

I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.

Reading was not just an escape or a Band-Aid; it was a deep form of feeling seen and recognized, and being able to see and recognize other kindred spirits. My dad was a writer, too, which also likely had something to do with that.

If you're supposed to be doing something, the spirits will come and help you. They have helped me out with lines I shouldn't have known, chords I shouldn't have known. Every once in a while I get lines from somewhere, and I think, I better write this down.

I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it.

You write a book, it's out for however many years, and with the passing of time, you're not the same person. I'm not the same person I was when I wrote those books; I'm not even the same person I was when I started writing 'Beg.' I had many shifts spiritually, and one of them was in the use of language.

I write about all the horrible things that can happen to kids as a way of keeping those things from happening to mine. Write the books, spit three times over your shoulder and you're safe.

I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect.

When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind of strange, beautiful thing it's doing in spite of my will, so to speak.

I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze.

Often the process of writing can feel like spitting into the ocean.

American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going.

I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.

I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I'm happy with it, then I put on my actor's hat.

I've only written two novels, neither of them published, where the book is dominated by a male point of view; in the 'Onyx Court' series, it's split roughly 50/50.

As a writer and a mom, I wish I could split into two or three different people so I could be with my kids all day, write all day, and go out and do the interviews all day. Multiplicity woman!