Quotes About Writing

It's so great to be able to write from home. My bread is rising downstairs, and I'm upstairs writing. I have a writing room that my grandchildren consider one of their playrooms.

I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth.

I suppose most crime writing is urban. There's not a lot... certainly not in Australia, people don't often set books in the countryside.

I'm not sure I could write a straight urban fantasy any more than I could write a straight contemporary story. I would end up being intimidated by all the small details.

I see myself writing in the tradition of urban ethnography and in the tradition of the sociology of poverty.

I wanted to write a book specifically aimed toward young people. I wanted to write a book that anybody can read and enjoy, but I did want to aim it at young people and, even more specifically, urban young people.

I can definitely write a book. Growing up, I really learned that. The stuff I was reading were urban books and I definitely got into it a lot.

It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.

I admire Eudora Welty. 'Delta Wedding' is a book I've given as a present to numerous women. Eudora Welty rocks. She writes such jewel-like, fine, refined short stories.

Ceaseless work, analysis, reflection, writing much, endless self-correction, that is my secret.

I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.

When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.

He writes so well he makes me feel like putting my quill back in my goose.

As a writer, the worst thing you can do is work in an environment of fear of rejection.

Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we will write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.

Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy.

Writing well has everything to do with being able to read one's own work with an eye toward the unmet possibilities that are there.

Writing is physical work. It's sweaty work. You just can't will yourself to become a good writer. You really have to work at it.

Every author has different ways of writing and what works for one author does not necessarily work for another.

I've read somewhere that when you're writing, you should stop while you're doing well so you always want to go back to work.

I didnt finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldnt work and I didnt have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more.

You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

A writer's work is the product of laziness.