Quotes About Writing

'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.

Mostly I sat down and said, 'I'm not going to write a boring story.' And that actually, surprisingly, solves most of your problems.

We are both drawn to surreal situations so the writing was a joy.

I just like magical, fantastical stuff. I don't really see it as surreal when I'm writing. It's just, I write, and then I have an idea, and usually, they're quite odd.

The first time I ever heard professional actors delivering lines that I wrote was completely surreal and was just a gigantic moment in my life. It was just a little bit mind-blowing and completely strange to have something that had been on my computer being said out loud.

A lot of times, real life is more surreal than writing.

My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.

Seeing my book on a billboard in New York was a bucket-list-type thing, but also a deeply surreal moment. I had to keep reminding myself that, oh, yes, I wrote that book.

As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: 'Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B.'

Writing 'Hoop Roots' was a substitute or a surrogate activity. I can't play anymore - my body won't cooperate - so in the writing of the book, I was looking to tell a good story about my life and about basketball, but I was also looking to entertain myself the way that I entertain myself when I play.

Now, the story makes no reference to specific years—it uses that eighteen-followed-by-a-dash business which writers were so fond of in those days, I've never understood why

Write what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?

It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places...

I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation.

It was [John Gardner's] conviction that if the words in the story were blurred because of the author's insensitivity, carelessness, or sentimentality, then the story suffered from a tremendous handicap. But there was something even worse and something that must be avoided at all costs: if the words and the sentiments were dishonest, the author was faking it, writing about things he didn't care about or believe in, then nobody could ever care anything about it.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best for writing fiction.

I dettagli sono il sangue della narrativa.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.

The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the single most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.