Quotes About Writing

I think it's a bit of a myth that if you can read music you can write music. It doesn't work like that.

Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.

You can write and write, but if you don't have someone who can nail that character, it's never going to live.

Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.

When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot.

Of course it's fun writing about an egomaniac, but I know there are going to be reviewers who've never met me, who don't know anything about me, who are going to say this is autobiography: he's just changed the names of a few people, and the rest is totally as it was.

All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself.

When you say the name Gilligan, you know who that is. If a show is good, if it's written well, you should be able to erase the names of the characters saying the lines and still be able to know who said it. If you can't do that, the show will fail.

I make up names for people all the time - it's part of writing. Very often, the name comes with the character, along with of a sense of who they are and what they do.

If we're really writing, we are exploring the unnamed emotional facets of the human heart. Not all emotions, not all states of mind have been named. Nor are all the names we have been given always accurate.

When I was writing about Gotham in 'Broken City,' I was writing about Chicago. I just substituted the names.

I still think I'm writing Nancy Drew with a mortgage.

I'd always wanted to write crime fiction. I loved Nancy Drew.

At first I imagined I'd write detective novels, because I loved 'Nancy Drew.'

You do get fond of your characters. Handing them on is like giving a child to a nanny.

Most of my books begin with a nap on my couch here, when I dream up characters and story lines, and then I write on my laptop in the recliner and handle the business side of email at my desk, which is sagging in the middle - maybe from so many words?

I write at home. I like to be able to take a nap, watch TV, make a sandwich, and if I wake up and don't feel like working, I'm not going to bang my head on my desk all day: I'll go out and do something else.

There's like a little bit of a narcissism - I think there's more than a little bit of narcissism about it, but it's just that you can become so anxious and self-obsessive about whether this thing that I'm writing is good; is this joke that I'm making good?

Writing your memoir is inherently narcissistic.

Magazine stories, the best ones anyway, are generally a combination of three elements: access, narrative, and disclosure.

Let's stop reflexively comparing Chinese writers to Chinese writers, Indian writers to Indian writers, black writers to black writers. Let's focus on the writing itself: the characters, the language, the narrative style.

I write in reverse: Rather than come up with a narrative and write jokes for that narrative, I write jokes independently of the narrative, then I try to fit them in.

Every work of history is a combination of argument and narrative. The longer I write, the more I emphasize the narrative, the story, and the less attention I give to the argument. Arguments come and go.

Narrative becomes the way you make sense of chaos. That's how you focus the world. It's the only reason you should ever try this writing job.