Quotes About Writing

It's hard for me to show work while I'm writing, because other people's comments will influence what happens.

Writing is nearly always a matter of finding whatever your brain needs to trick it into being creative, and in my case, a tiny little bit of fact just seems to work.

Wearing down seven number two pencils is a good day's work.

A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.

Trying to write while I'm distracted definitely doesn't work for me. I'm also a compulsive saver of my files, so every writing session ends with me emailing what I've written to myself, just in case.

The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

Writer's block is a phony, made up, BS excuse for not doing your work.

I always think first about the nature of the story. When I had the idea for 'The Namesake,' I felt that it had to be a novel - it couldn't work as a story.

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

Solitude and quiet are highly desirable, but the lack of them is no barrier to writing... The will to work builds all the seclusion that one needs.

One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one's being to take over the work from time to time.

Every quirky girl doesn't have to be the best-friend character. It's a very limiting and self-fulfilling prophecy. People only write things that will get green-lit, so they write to those stereotypes.

Even the 'Negro' shows like 'Amos and Andy' and 'Beulah' are written largely by white writers - the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.

Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.

I feel a lot of pressure when I'm writing because I know, you know, if they looked at a synopsis of the book, what they read could only confirm all the stereotypes that they have about us and about people like us.

My biggest fear in writing 'Gossip Girl' was that the characters would sound like stereotypical rich, air-headed heiresses. These were my friends. They were smart and multifaceted. They had interests and passions. They wanted to become lawyers and doctors and writers and filmmakers.

In our band, every member has input, but me and Steve do the majority of the writing. We start the songs, the rest of the band help us finish it.

There are parts in albums where I wrote a lot of the lyrics. There are parts on albums where Steve wrote a lot of the lyrics, even albums where Steve did the majority of the lyric writing. Then there were albums like 'Coming Home' where I did most of the chorus lyric writing. But it was always split.

Steve Martin is such an exquisite and precise writer. Everything is so clear; it's like a bell. He says what he means and says it so beautifully.

I've never written about my husband, Steve, or any of my children because I know them all too well. I see them in all their complexities which makes them impossible to render on the printed page.

As anyone who has read 'Sports Illustrated's Steve Rushin knows, it's quite possible to write an unreadable column without being a TV pundit. But if you want to be a consistently good columnist, you can't be on television.

I sat down to take a break from writing a book and wrote a spec feature that would end up being the movie 'Lies & Alibis' with Steve Coogan.

I don't aspire to write like Steve King. Sure, I admire his work, and I think he's a hell of a nice guy; we met shortly after my first Stoker win. I aspire to write like Jonathan Maberry.