Quotes About Writing

I use my computer to take notes more and more because my handwriting is so bad. I'm a lefty and it's getting worse and worse.

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.

I often spend the majority of my time thinking and writing down notes.

I take almost no notes when I write. I have one notebook - this old green leather notebook that my dad gave me a decade ago.

I've had so many little ideas I've written down here and there. Some ideas I've got reams of notes for.

I myself never make any notes. Usually, if I write something down, I can't read it afterwards.

In the best possible scenario, whenever you get notes from people, they're good notes, and they see things that you wouldn't have seen otherwise, and they make you a better writer.

When I write notes in my journal, I'm just trying to scribble down as much as possible. Later on, I decide whether to follow some of those first impressions or whether to abandon them.

I like hearing other writers just about the way they approach writing. It gives me energy for my own work. It's weird; I'm always taking notes about fiction when I'm listening to people talk about craft.

I'm usually up until around 1 A.M. or 2 A.M. I don't get much sleep - and I prefer it that way, writing notes and coming up with different ideas for two to three hours between 11 P.M. and 1 A.M. or 2 A.M.

I always take notes on my phone of lyric ideas.

I've had situations before where there are more people giving notes than there are writers on the show.

I'd like to think that my mentors, I've had the highest of education and one thing I've always noted, they were always writing stuff down, taking notes.

I love to write. I love it. I mean there's nothin in the world I like better, and that includes sex, probably because I'm so very bad at it.

Writing takes gall. I like to think that's true even for writers with several books under their belt, writers who have been doing it for years. It takes something - guts, gumption, self-delusion - to ask for a reader's time when we all know there's nothing new under the sun; that it's all been said, or written, before.

I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.

If you think you're living in an imperfect world, you can write a book about a better world and hope that enough of your readers will notice the difference between the two.

You have to have talent to some extent - I certainly hope I have talent - but you have to have luck as well. Once you get that first shot, that will get you noticed for the rest of your books and that will give the rest of your books a better chance.

One of the most fun things for me, as a writer, is when readers ask questions like, 'Oh, I noticed that you have a lot of water and baptism imagery in your book. Did you do that on purpose?'

I consider science fiction and fantasy my genre. And I've noticed over the years that there doesn't tend to be a lot of lighthearted, comedic stuff.

My wife noticed that I wrote really good complaint letters about faulty products and that I could get anything I wanted out of these big corporations, and she said that I was a good writer and that I should go to my dad and ask him for help.

When I started writing, I did have some idealised notion of my dad as a writer. But I have less and less of a literary rivalry with him as I've gone on. I certainly don't feel I need his approval, although maybe that's because I'm confident that I've got it.

I just write books, and I do it without any notion of what I should do or shouldn't do.

I gave up the notion of writing the life of Joan of Arc, as I found that there was absolutely no new material to be gleaned on her history - in fact, she had been thrashed out.