Quotes About Writing

I usually write in my underwear, with a space heater running full blast, and three dogs sleeping at me feet.

I don't know anybody in the underworld. I make this stuff up. I don't know any criminals.

DeLillo has said that he no longer feels a compulsion to write long, compendious books. In his later years, Saul Bellow said something similar. DeLillo, of course, has written very long in the past, notably with the 850-page Underworld (1997), and his story has been America.

'Underworld' was my first filmed book. I think there are about seven of my lines in it.

I'm a fairly undisciplined writer.

I'm still undisciplined in the fact that I'm not writing anything down. I just get these lines and start piecing it together and then going back.

To say that I have an undisciplined mind would not be incorrect overall, but it's a little off the mark because I have great discipline when I write - but only for about ten minutes.

My only qualifications to be an actor were that I'm daring, and I'm a quick learner. I've always learnt by watching what other people do. It's the same with my writing. I write what I know. Structurally, I write in a very undisciplined way.

Most writers live in self-imposed exile, even when they don't leave their country. They prefer the undiscovered country inside their own heads.

While I was writing 'Stick Out Your Tongue' in Beijing, the police began knocking on my door again. As soon as I finished the book, I moved to Hong Kong so that I could work undisturbed on my next novel.

When I feel I'm repeating myself, I'll probably pack it in. What will undoubtedly happen is I'll write one too many. The important thing is to recognize when you've written too many and stop there.

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

For most of my writing life, I've refused to allow myself to believe that writing was a significant form of action. I always felt very uneasy about the fact that all I did was write in a situation as desperate as apartheid South Africa. Whether I was correct or not is a different issue.

You have to keep writing. It's almost like practice, almost like tennis, that actually after a few days of not writing, first of all it makes you slightly depressed and uneasy, but it also affects the style when you start up again. You need to get the show on the road.

My novel got published, and I became a paid writer, which was nice, and then it came out, and nobody bought it, so I became an unemployed writer again.

I was a bit of an accident really - I certainly didn't set out to write a cookbook or three. I didn't have a plan. I was unemployed, writing a blog about local politics and a few recipes, and it was more successful than I could ever have imagined it to be.

Another reason I did not make films is that I liked being unemployed, since that is when I read, study and write.

I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.

I am not a total, complete nitwit when it comes to selling books. I promise you there will be unexpected things. Some of them I don't know yet. She's writing it all herself.

As a writer, I try to appeal to the 'elusive boy audience' the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings.

Some of the best moments I've ever written have come about because someone, somewhere, blew my preconceptions out of the water and dropped a detail in passing that took the work in an entirely new, entirely unexpected, direction.

I like beautiful writing, pain, unexpected humor, and the message that, at the last second, people are going to be kind to each other. It almost doesn't matter what the genre is.

With Jubilee I had a natural interest to write about something on the opposite end of human experience - a real celebration of release and joy, which is in some ways an unexpected theme for the indie rock genre in general.

It's always struck me as unfair that writing has so little sensation when it's going well.