Quotes About Writing

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers, you see, but we're also realists, of a sort.

Sit down every day and DO IT. Writing is a self-taught craft; the more you work at it, the more skilled you become. And when you're not writing, READ.

I get very invested in characters, it's the only way I find that I can write a book and really make it work.

The writing for me is hard work and I always look forward to drawing the pictures.

I like to try to do a little work before I do anything in the morning, even if it's a paragraph.

Any woman or man who would write the truth of their lives would write a great work. But no one has dared to write the truth of their lives.

I love writing. I love to write, and I would eventually love to have some of my work produced.

In my own work, I tend to cover a lot of time and to jump back and forward in time, and sometimes the way I do this is not very straightforward.

My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing 'The Aeneid' and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.

For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

Writing itself is a bad enough trade, rightly held up to ridicule and contempt by the greater part of mankind, and especially by those who do real work, plowing, riding, sailing

Writing is grunt work - you need to have self-motivation, perseverance, and faith... talent is the smallest part of it.

I love nerdy work. I love writing notes. I try to go back, as much as I can, to feed what happens and why they do what they do.

I'm not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work.

Writing is hard work and bad for the health.

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

Louis Pasteur said, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If you're really engaged in the writing, you'll work yourself out of whatever jam you find yourself in.

First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.

I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.

I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.

I am dissatisfied with everything I have ever written and regard it all only as a preparation for that one work which probably I don't have it in me to write but which I hope I can go on trying for.

How I work is that I write a story I'd like to read. Then you fly to Paris or Sydney and the interviewers talk about the greater significance of your work.

I don't separate writing songs from poetry and short fiction. In the area where I work in my house, there's a word processor and a guitar.