Quotes About Writing

It felt very natural to me to write a Christmas song, but at the same time I had to really put all sorts of pressure aside and just let the creativity flow and see what came out.

I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.

She [Isis] invented a form of shorthand which she taught to the Egyptians and provided them a way to abridge their excessively involved script.

Just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper." ? Christine de Pizan She was the first woman in France to earn a living by her writing! Born 1364, she advocated for women's equality, wrote poetry, novels, biography, an autobiography, literary, political and religious commentary. She was the widowed mother of three and, perhaps, the first feminist!

Si las mujeres hubiesen escrito los libros, estoy segura de que lo habrían hecho de otra forma, porque ellas saben que se las acusa en falso.]

But … even if I did – which I didn't – how could I have found them myself, found them old and faded? If I only wrote them down myself – later? How can Sebastian have found them a hundred years ago – if I hadn't even written them yet? And where did the information come from?

I really do feel like I was born to write and tell stories.

Good prose is solitary work.

A writer who can't use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.

I did not think that I was angry, but clearly anger was reflected in my writing. I did not think that I had been affected emotionally, but it was clear from my writing that I was still very emotional about the trial some six months after it ended.

When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I'm trying to build a word ladder up to my brain.

But what happens if and when writers begin to outnumber readers? What happens when writing becomes more attractive than reading? Will we become -- or are we already -- a nation of performers with no audience?

I seldom have a firm plot or any idea at all about the ending. But there is a clear, almost mathematically conceptual idea that determines length--the length or brevity of a literary work being comparable to the size of the frame needed by a picture.

When I am asked how or why I wrote this or that, I always find myself quite embarrassed. I would gladly furnish not merely the questioner, but myself as well, with an exhaustive answer, but can never do so. I cannot recreate the context in its entirety, yet I wish that I could, so that at least the literature I myself make might be made slightly less of a mysterious process than bridge-building and bread-baking.

Writing is - at least for me - movement forward, the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen - and here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and sensual materials in interaction strives - on paper to boot! - towards incarnation.

Don't send a poet to London.

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.

Here was a man who'd learned to write before he could think, a man who threw out logical fallacies like tacks behind a getaway car, and he always always always got away.

Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices." [ Ten rules for writing fiction ( The Guardian , 20 February 2010)]

Write what I know, who wants to read that? If only our apartment was haunted or I was the tiniest bit possessed by the devil.

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

You'd die of shame at the thought of showing anyone what you'd written. Somebody somewhere says that 'the urge to preserve is the basis of all art'. Unaware of this thought, you keep a diary. You keep it not only because it gratifies your urge to sling words around, everyday with impunity, but because without it, you will lose your life, ts detail will leak away into the sand and be gone forever.