Quotes About Writing

I had no idea what to expect when I first started writing.

I had no idea how long books were supposed to be.

I guess when I first started writing music, I really had no idea if anyone was ever going to hear what I was writing and almost no intention of people hearing it. So, it was kind of this journal. It was pretty unfiltered.

I have no intention of becoming a shorthand author.

I had the Forrest Gump' DVD and started watching. While watching it, I had no intention of writing it. When I started watching it, I got some flashes that it can be adapted in Hindi. That's how it started.

I have no interest in writing, generally speaking, about America at all - even if it does continue to terrify me.

You can read a character that feels amazing, but if the world around it and all the writing around it - even the way the stage descriptions are written - don't feel just right, then you know there's no point in doing the project. No character is ever bigger than the whole film.

There's no point for me in being a writer and having all these blocked places where I feel I can't think freely and imagine freely. There just really is no point.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

Yo no soy poeta. Leo poesía, pero jamás he podido escribir un solo verso. Y no porque no lo haya intentado.

You can write a three-decker novel or a whole history of Transylvania without knowing or caring in the least what the parts of speech are—and in first grade, unless you're an unusual little person who takes an Aristotelian pleasure in verbal classification, it's an unnecessary encumbrance and a distraction.

For a full week after trying to reach the editor of The Atlantic, I occupied myself with other things. On October 31 I made some cheerful notes about Tracy Chapman's singing and about Bizet's Carmen. On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn't enough.

Potentially, anyone writing on the Web can reach a global audience. In practice, hardly anyone ever does.

Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?' Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

from his random observations after reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens) In the Old Curiosity Shop I discovered that in the character of Dick Swiveller, Dickens provided P.G. Wodehouse with pretty much the whole of his oeuvre. In David Copperfield, David's bosses Spenlow and Jorkins are what must be the earliest fictional representations of good cop/bad cop.

writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers.

You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.

But enough already of what grammarians will recognize as the third conditional: if + pluperfect + would.

There aren't any buts," said Bill. "That's the whole point of being a writer, isn't it? If I wanted buts, I'd go and work in a fucking but factory.

I'm a writer. Life is supposed to pass me by, while I watch it.

Non ci dimentichiamo mai che alcuni libri sono scritti male; però dovremmo ricordarci che a volte sono anche letti male.

Writing a balanced, beautiful novel, where plot and character and setting and pacing and narrative structure and imagery and, above all, story work in harmony and true proportion, is fucking *hard*. --Nicola Griffith, www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20030929...

Someone's writing down your mistakes, someone's documenting your downfall.