Quotes About Writing

I am writing like an angel

Ello no significa, sin embargo, que la escritura filosófica deba ser poética sino que sobre todo debe contener las huellas de una escritura poética que se desvanece, debe exhibir de algún modo el retiro de la poesía.

Write. Don't talk about writing. Don't tell me about your wonderful story ideas. Don't give me a bunch of 'somedays'. Plant your ass and scribble, type, keyboard. If you have any talent at all it will leak out despite your failure to pay attention in English." [ The Instrumentalities of the Night: An Interview with Glen Cook , The SF Site, September 2005]

To write is to educate and to entertain. Never to exclude.

Nothing is the whole story. The self's curse – and the writer's.

This writing malarkey should come with a health warning: MAY CAUSE INCESSANT DEVIATION FROM ORIGINAL INTENTION, AND DROWSINESS.

The muse holds no appointments. You can never call on it. I don't understand people who get up at 9 o'clock in the morning, put on the coffee and sit down to write.

I'm a husband, a father of two, a full-time teacher, and so my writing process mostly involves sitting down and writing, any chance I get, anywhere I am, for as long as life will let me. Music helps. Good light helps. I love quiet and coffee when I can get them. But I can write on a bus, in a dentist office's waiting room, in bed with a clip-on booklight, almost anywhere. And I try to do at least some every single day.

I'm on the whatever-gets-this-book-that-I'm-working-on-written track. I have really done it a lot of different ways, to be honest. I'm a full-time Dad, I've been a full-time teacher for some 20 years. Good Girls is book number seven. One of the things that has made it possible for me is I get up every day and I find a way to fit some writing in, no matter what.

I've never understood the logic that says a work doesn't need to be judged on the quality of its writing or characters simply because its genre. On the other hand, I've also never understood the logic of excusing a work from the need to tell a story worth telling about people worth knowing simply because the author writes pretty language or has some insights to offer.

Sometimes the best way to express what we feel is to put our thoughts down on paper.

I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.

My friend Jeffrey Deaver, successful author of The Bone Collector and many other thrillers, confessed once that his first short story, written as a child, was a Bond-inspired spy adventure (he refused to let me read it . . . afraid, maybe, that I might try to publish it as The Bond Collector).

There's a certain magic about writing even when the characters refuse to act the way I want them to.

Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

I do not like to write - I like to have written.

Swiftboating enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called trashing, attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all. Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad. p.189

I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know.

I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie's novel Ceremony. She is the Thought Woman who names things and so brings them into being. Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.

To write is to bring an inner voice into the outer world, to believe that our thoughts are worth entering the thinking of others, and to make real what has never existed in quite the same way before. What could be a better path to self-value than that?

Kirjoittaminen on ainoa asia, jota tehdessäni minusta ei tunnu siltä, että minun pitäisi tehdä jotain muuta.

I was the only "girl writer," probably because the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy. Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule. Later, when Tina Fey was head writer and star of Saturday Night Live, she could still say, "Only in comedy does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel like I should be doing something else.