Quotes About Writing

All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that and set out to write something story-led.

I'm still very much in the apprentice stage of writing. I read somewhere that you need to write a million words before you know what you're doing - so I'm headed that way, but I'm nowhere near there.

I do still read comics since I started writing for DC, but nowhere near as much as I used to, and I'm finding now that it's becoming harder to read comics as a consumer, so I think I'll have to make the call there and stop reading them.

I don't think people realize how many scripts you write that go nowhere.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

Green Arrow was a very complicated character to take on because he has archaic weaponry. Catwoman, I think is more of a simple archetype to grasp, so it will be about nuance. But I think you need three or four issues before you say, 'Ah ha! Now I really know how to write this character!' You're carrying them around with you.

I'm a writer, so I like nuances.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.

I've always scribbled, and I still do it. I've written numerous scripts for films for which I think I'd be perfect as the complex, intelligent and, yes, modern heroine. Embarrassingly bad, all of them. I've had to come to terms with the fact that I'm not a writer.

I was educated at a convent in Kent. It was run by Irish and French nuns. I mostly hated it but they did allow me to follow my passion for drama, writing plays, performing, and directing my works.

I was a very good nurse, but I burned out after eight years or so because it wasn't what I truly wanted to do. Writing is what I belong to.

There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.

Nurses don't get paid very much. It didn't take long to realize that I could make more as a writer. I loved nursing, but I loved writing more.

I know that there's a cultural expectation that women be nurturing, delicate flowers. And I am. So delicate. But that doesn't mean I can't write a good, gory murder scene.

I'm a Macintosh nut. I got my PowerBook, so if I'm not writing jokes, I'm working on that.

Usually, if I have a day to write, I will spend the first hour thinking about how I am going to structure my day. I will also spend time helping my kids to get ready for school. Then I spend an hour making and eating breakfast, because balanced nutrition has suddenly become very important.

I could write and help a lot of kids, or teach and help a few and go nuts.

I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

Lack of romance is my real objection to writing on a computer.

I admire writers who can remain objective and distanced, but that doesn't seem to be in my toolbox somehow. I have to care, I have to have skin in the game.

I write with as much objectivity as I can.

To my mind, a journalist needs to espouse objectivity and distance, while a writer practises an art that is more free.

I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting... It can be sometimes that delineated.