Quotes About Writing

Sometimes I would write something that was so private, people would say, 'Make it more universal.' I never liked that idea. I always thought the more personal a song was, the more people would want to hear it.

I don't even use italics or boldface; that's clutter, not clarity. Fancy fonts are fine for blogs, just as calligraphy is fine for diaries. But when you're writing for anyone other than yourself, you want to get as universal as possible.

I never really thought about my music being universal. When I set out to write, it was just a feeling that felt good to me. I never thought about being able to reach everybody.

There are a lot of great love stories. It's just the best thing. Why wouldn't you write about it? Why wouldn't you want to read about it? But it's hard to write about. It's weird to have such a powerful and universal feeling and hope that you can write that and make it real for people.

I write music as a staff writer for Universal Music Group, and I have since 2007. I've never talked about it publicly because I wanted to earn the right to be in the same room as the great writers I write with and not shoot my mouth off because I'm an actor. It's really important to me, and I really care about it.

Whenever I write, I try and approach my stories from some kind of universal theme or idea or emotion.

I try not to push characters too close to myself because they get harder to write, but as a writer, you try to find odd little personal experiences that you hope are universal or think might be universal.

I understand the desire to write and read about the death of publishing. It's a perversely and universally appealing topic.

If you're going to write time travel stories, you have to sort of figure out how does time travel work in this particular universe that I'm dealing with.

For me, writing about hotels is like writing about being in a parallel universe. The sense of voyeurism, and the sense of removedness, and there are all these people silently above you and next to you.

Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.

As a writer, I am not goddess of the universes I create. I am at most a stage manager of the plentiful gifts which tumble out of the horn of plenty, which is to say there is a source so sweet and forgiving and generous that I pray every day to let that source be my guide.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.

Actually, I graduated from university as a journalist.

More than half of my former students teach - elementary and high school, community college and university. I taught them to be passionate about literature and writing, and to attempt to translate that passion to their own students. They are rookie teachers, most likely to be laid off and not rehired, even though they are passionate.

I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

For graduate school I ended up going to the University of Iowa, which is, of course, the best graduate writing program in the country.

I teach a non-fiction writing class at New York University, and one of my great pleasures is deciding on the syllabus.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.

After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.

I majored in journalism at Arizona State University, where I began writing the columns I write now, but I cannot, in good conscience, refer to myself as a writer. I'm a columnist, maybe a journalist, I guess I'm an author, but writer... no. That's not up to me to call myself, that's rather lofty. It's for the reader to decide.