Quotes About Writing

When I started to write culinary mysteries, I did it because nobody was doing it anymore.

I've always thought Harper Lee might have made a great decision. Much as you'd like to have more books by her, there's something about just one that's kind of mysterious and nice. On the other hand, the New York gossip about me was that I'd never write another book. So I thought, 'Well, I will then.'

Series television is kind of intensive in terms of time. You fall hard for TV writing, but it's almost love-hate. You're under pressure all the time, but that pressure gets interesting things out of you that are, you know, mysterious.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that writing is mysterious; you don't ever truly know where it is coming from, so don't edit yourself line by line. Don't get in your own way. Whatever is truly there at the core, that is your voice.

Esoteric or inner knowledge is no different from other kinds of human knowledge and ability. It is a mystery for the average person only to the extent that writing is a mystery for those who have not yet learned to write.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

Knowing that Gene and Morgan were playing those roles made it much easier to put the script together-we knew who we were writing it for. It took some mystery away.

The things that converge in the writing of a play come from a complex of motives, a genesis shrouded in a certain kind of mystery.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

I often wonder if I had the complete freedom to not have to write, if I would write. That's the one mystery that I hope I get to experience.

I have never, ever, not once, met a writer who said he or she would never read a mystery or a story set in some imagined future.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year.

Flannery O'Connor is my creative hero. I think she's the greatest American writer. Her book, 'Mystery and Manners,' is my creative bible.

Writing a mystery is more difficult than other kinds of books because a mystery has a certain framework that must be superimposed over the story.

It's not as though I decided to sit down and write a mystery novel so I could capitalize on my parents' success.

Crime novels have a clear beginning, middle, and end: a mystery, its investigation, and its resolution. The reader expects events to play out logically and efficiently, and these expectations force the writer to spend a good deal of time working on macrostructure rather than prettifying individual sentences.

There are two ways to approach the writing of a mystery novel: adhere to the rules, or break them with glee.

Mystery fiction was considered a stepchild of literature.

Writing does produce a very unique satisfaction. There are times when I'm writing that it's frustrating or appalling or difficult, but when it goes well, it goes really well, and there is a feeling of rightness, like I'm doing the thing I was meant to do, almost in a mystical way, like I'm at an appropriate angle to the world.

If I had to read only one author, it would be Gabriel Garcia Marquez because I love the mystical, magical quality of his writing.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

There is a myth that writers get to choose their stories. You don't get to choose your story any more than you get to choose your children. You can make the decision to write, but beyond that, at the end of the day, it's going to come out how it's going to come out.