Quotes About Writing

I think it would be harder for me not to write comedy because the comic view of things is the one that comes most naturally to me.

Writing never came naturally and I still have to force my hand to do it.

Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books.

The beginning of a book is always the hardest part for me. I'm a Chapter 3 kind of writer, which means I naturally start at Chapter 3.

Humor writing is something that comes naturally to me.

Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.

I'd be lying if I said that any part of writing is easy for me, but I have always found that setting comes more naturally to me than, say, writing action scenes.

There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.

Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering.

A written man is more porous and accessible than a live one.

A writer's unconscious is difficult to read, but the imagination is rooted in the unconscious.

Short stories are often treated as the poor cousins of novels.

Cunningham himself said in an interview in Poz that he couldn't help noticing that as soon as he wrote a novel without a blowjob, they gave him the Pulitzer Prize.

If everyone took anti-depressants, Chekhov would have nothing to write about.

If everyone took antidepressants, Chekhov would have had nothing to write about.

Christopher Fowler

I'll have you know I keep detailed notes. Mistakes sometimes occur in translation.' 'Why do your notes need translating?' 'I write them in Aramaic. It's a three-thousand-year-old language so I have to make up a lot of words.

The radicals assumed that acting was more important than speaking. Talking and writing books, Winstanley insisted, is 'all nothing and must die; for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing.' It is a thought worth pondering by those who read books about the seventeenth-century radicals, no less than by those who write them. Were you doers or talkers only? Bunyan asked his generation. What canst thou say?

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.

At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.

I'm very happy by myself--I'm lucky in that way--if I've got enough to read and something to write about and a bit of alcohol for me to add an edge, not to dull it.

Your favorite occupation? Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner.

There must be some connection between the general nullity of Christie's prose and the tendency of her detectives to take Jewishness as a symptom of crime.

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings , and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated?