Quotes About Writing

A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.

a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

I teach for the Book Trust, which promotes reading and writing with children.

Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.

It was journalism at its best: irreverent, mischievous and beholden to no one.

I like pens. My writing is so amazing there's never a need to erase.

Of course it would be great to sell lots and lots of copies of The Beast of Cretacea. But the bottom line for me is to sell enough copies to convince my publisher to let me do a sequel. I spent three years creating the world of Cretacea and the personalities of all the characters who inhabit it. All I want to do now is go back.

What does it take to be a writer? 1) Foolhardily believing that someone might actually be interested in reading what you've written. 2) Spending an enormous amount of time writing it as well as you can. 3) Accepting that, at best, you'll probably be paid something around 25 cents an hour for your efforts.

Those who maintain that writing cannot be taught are in effect promoting the Priesthood Theory of Writing. I short, a few are called, most are not, and nothing anyone does can alter that process.

What needs to be reinforced is the idea that good writing - solid, honest, entertaining, beautiful good writing - is simultaneously the reward, the challenge, and the goal.

David foster Wallace: '...the revelatory power of freakishly thorough noticing, of corralling and controlling detail.[...] he trains you to study the world through the lens of his prose.' NYTimes, 7 Feb 2016

Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.

You learn to write the same way you learn to play golf... You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn't divinely inspired – it's hard work.

The writer overthinks by necessity, collecting and complicating small details, while the tournament golfer needs to be simple, myopic, fixated on one detail at a time.

Often, writer's block will occur when I don't understand a character or his/her motivations. So I will make notes analysing characters.

When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.

I used to write at home, but it didn't ever occur to me to be a writer.

I am a hopeless pantser, so I don't do much outlining. A thought will occur to me, and I'll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I'll worry about untangling it later. I'm glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent.

It would not occur to me to write a joke like, 'This would be great if I was more like Andrew Dice Clay.' It's not the voice I write in - which is largely an extension of the voice in my head that I think in.

I'm not saying it never occurred to me to want to write a masterpiece, but I really doubt I could.

No, I never thought that I would be a writer. I had always been told I could write well, but it never occurred to me that I might make my living that way.

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that human beings wrote books. It was a kind of cognitive dissonance for me... I just didn't think it was something that people did.

Ever since I started writing in college, I have, save for a few short breaks here and there, been working away on something. I love it, I need it, and so it never occurred to me to put writing on the back burner.