Quotes About Writing

My being a writer and playing Scrabble are connected. If I have a good writing day, I'll take a break and play online Scrabble. My favorite word as a child was 'carrion,' before I knew what it meant. I later created crossword puzzles, which was a lot about puns, and how words would create these strange, strange things.

In a strange way, you have to have a certain amount of distance from a thing in order to be able to write about it.

Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one.

Strangely enough, I don't mention my sister too much in my columns because she nags me and says, 'Don't make me look foolish. Don't write nonsense about me. Don't make jokes about me.'

I think I'm writing for an intelligent stranger - you know, in my mind I can't remember who coined that phrase first. I don't want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot - mostly when I hear popular music.

The best thing about being an author is writing stories and having people - strangers all over the world - connect with them.

When my father died in Greece, leaving my mother strapped, a cheque arrived next day from my Greek publishers who'd just bought two of my books for pounds 500.

They were written in the early '90s when I was strapped for cash.

All writing is a sin against speechlessness,' Beckett had said. He would have stopped, I thought, if he could.

a novelist's work is often a strategy (I don't mean the author need be aware of this) for dealing with some personal dilemma. Not just that the dilemma is "worked out" in the narrative, as critics often tell us, but that the acts of writing and publishing and positioning oneself in the world of literature are all part of an attempt to find a solution, however provisional, to some deep personal unease.

It is very good, Wisehammer, it's very well written, but it's too-too-political. It will be considered provocative." "You don't want me to say it." "Not tonight. We have many people against us." "I could tone it down. I could omit 'We left our country for our country's good.'" "That's the best line.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush's dog getting a book deal.

The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine on harvest day, from victory stands.

Though a degree from Yale was not required, Pinchot wanted his foresters to be able to write well, for the numerous reports that their enemies in Congress would be second-guessing.

All those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is, and oh, how tedious the creative process, and oh, what a tortured genius they are. Don't buy into it. . . . As if difficulty and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work. Doing great work simply because you love it, sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that's a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists make." This

Ben Franklin's excellent advice: "If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.

2. I'm just caging my monkey mind on paper so I can get on with my fucking day.

By focusing inward on yourself as a writer instead of outward on what you think readers will want to read, you'll end up creating the best and most original work, and that one-in-a-thousand person who happens to love it will end up finding their way to you.

started out basically imagining I was writing for a stadium full of replicas of myself—which made things easy because I already knew exactly what topics interested them, what writing style they liked, what their sense of humor was, etc.

Every writer in this book has a slightly different process, but they all start with the same thing: a blank page.

All you do is you pick a goal and you write it down 15 times a day in some specific sentence form, like 'I, Scott Adams, will become an astronaut,' for example. And you do that every day.

Naval Ravikant (page 546) regularly credits Scott's short blog post "The Day You Became a Better Writer" for improving his writing.

The Gary Halbert Letter (también conocido como The Boron Letters) y Ogilvy on Advertising.

What I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think. I'd say, 'I think I have an idea,' but when I begin to write it, I realize, 'I have no idea,' and I don't actually know what I think until I try and write it. . . . That was the revelation.