Quotes About Writing

Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.

Luckily, I'm not a stand-up comedian, so I don't get the fear of standing on stage in front of a dead audience: my humorous pieces have to make it past an editor before they get exposed to the public.

But I can also write in crappy motel rooms, while standing in line, or sitting in the dentist's chair.

Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

I don't particularly enjoy standing alone and recording my own voice or my own stuff. It's sometimes fun to do for demos and stuff, but I really enjoy the social act of recording records, because writing it is so lonely. And it has to be.

I'll continue on the path I've been taking, feet on the ground, describing people's lives, describing people's emotions, writing from the standpoint of the ordinary people.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

When you start out on a project as an actor, you know, you approach the character from the standpoint of maybe writing a list - even if it's a mental list that you make - of the adjectives that the character has or that character possesses.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

I really love standup, and I really love writing standup.

The role of a comedian is to go in and make something funny. That might be a situation where I'm writing, a situation where I'm in control, like standup or something of my own that I'm making, or it might be something like being an actor in someone else's project.

I was a standup comedian, which is kind of like writing and directing yourself.

Every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing. ... There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any writing of mine dealing with this subject.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

Dogs with broken legs are shot; men with broken souls write through the night.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

I'd rather write about laughing than crying, For laughter makes men human, and courageous.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

Christ is the Word of God in person. The Bible is the Word of God in writing. Both are the Word of God in the words of men. Both have a human nature and a divine nature.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

Some very plausible stuff is being written by women in a way that most men are not doing.

I don't suppose a writing man ever really gets rid of his old crocus-yellow neckties. Sooner or later, I think, they show up in his prose, and there isn't a hell of a lot he can do about it.