Quotes About Writing

The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.

All criticism hurts me. I'm so in the wrong business.

We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.

I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake.

You simply keep putting down one damn word after the other, as you hear them, as they come to you. You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist.

For me, being a writer is not an altered state. It's very ponderous, and very--it's like being a shoemaker. You know, shoemakers stick to your last and you stay there working over your last, and it's pretty drudgy in a lot of ways.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn't think I'd have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn't know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

I'll live to be one year younger, because I can't stand the idea of a world without you in it, and die buried beneath an avalanche of my own books.

Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.

Mene mene tekel upsharin,' Jace said with a faint smile. 'You don't recognize it? It's from the Bible, vampire. The old one. That's your book, isn't it?' Just because I'm Jewish doesn't mean I've memorized the Old Testament.' It's the Writing on the Wall. "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end; thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting." It's a portent of doom--it means the end of an empire.

Ragnor's important business was probably getting together to write a burn book with Raphael. Magnus could see them now, sharing a bench and scribbling happily away about Magnus's stupid hair.

Every time a writer creates a character with a particularly troubled background (or a kinky sexual bent) it seems that somebody in the "real world" assumes that the writer is working from personal experience.

I am an author of the analytical critique. And because of that, a ton of research is done by me in order to bring an examination into comprehensive being.

Stephen King is my Maine man.

Menulis bukanlah tentang uang. Uang adalah peristiwa besar, kejadian hebat yang meskipun menyenangkan, tidak bertahan lama dalam hati.

and in these dreams I was participant and observer as I am again now, dreaming of writing this.

We should not, therefore, try to get 'behind' the work, Barthes argues. There is nothing there. Instead, 'the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced' (and the metaphor suggests that the quest for intention generates a kind of violence). We should look at the text, Barthes urges, not through it. And his manifesto concludes with a ringing declaration: 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author'.

Her stories do not bring in a realism in which the worst is taken for granted, but a realism in which love, caring and compassion appear, and most certainly hope. 'This type of realism does exist,' Tom Cookson said of her writing. There

Writing is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come up with the right word.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in the mirror which waits always before or behind

I first got into writing because I got involved in the production of a magazine for army wives. They were short of copy one day and the editor asked me to write a piece about being an army wife "and make it funny". Good at obeying orders I did as I was told, the piece was a success, I was asked to write a regular piece and slowly it ended up as a book.