Quotes About Writing

Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.

Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own--and work is often the keyhole through which you peer.

An essay is a work of literary art which has a minimum of one anecdote and one universal idea.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

Writers tend to be addicted to houses ... We work at home, indulging the agoraphobia endemic to our kind. We are immersed in our surroundings to an almost morbid degree.

Acting is glamour but writing is hard work, so I'm going to be an actress.

If it's well written and well directed and you've got good actors to work with, acting is easy. But making sure all the ducks are in a row is the hard part. It's very rare

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

If you like to tell stories and compose sentences, and if you work hard at being good at these things, then you are a writer even if you haven't published anything.

When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair.

To a writer, an open browser tab is like a glass of whiskey. 1 or 2 can help the work. Too many ensures that nothing gets done.

I made a startling discovery. Time spent writing = output of work. Amazing.

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

I was standing in the schoolyard waiting for a child when another mother came up to me. Have you found work yet? she asked. Or are you still just writing?

None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life - motherhood, middle age, etc. - often influence my subject matter.

I like photography and writing and travel, so I have a lot of cerebral occupations. I am going to become a sailor and do a world tour on my yacht if I don't get any more work.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.

I myself don't know what makes my books work. I enter a bookstore and I'm frankly overwhelmed by the number of books in most of them, and I know people are buying mine.

David Mamet was great to work with. He was everything that I thought he would be as a director. He's incredibly articulate, an easy collaborator. Extraordinarily knowledgeable about film and writing.

To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap.

Sometimes I get ideas for lyrics in anyplace, but I work a lot in the studio. So I collect little bits of lyrics. I go through the box of lyrics I have and see if something fits.

When I work I have a sculptor's sense of the shape of the words I'm making. I use a machine with larger than average letters: the bigger the better.

There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin; the second is never to finish.