Quotes About Writing

I don't outline at all; I don't find it useful, and I don't like the way it boxes me in. I like the element of surprise and spontaneity, of letting the story find its own way.

For me, writing is a job. I do not separate the work from the act of writing like two things that have nothing to do with each other. I arrange words one after another, or one in front of another, to tell a story, to say something that I consider important or useful, or at least important or useful to me.

I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.

Sometimes reading other writers helps. You learn some little technique that turns out to be useful, or simply are reinspired by the amazing things others do.

One of the nice things about writing is you can take essentially painful things in your life and turn them into something that might be useful, or at least entertaining, to somebody else.

The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.

I don't mean it to sound egomaniacal, but in a way, for me, it was very useful to imagine that I was the only one who was taking pen in hand. I'd always been told that it was impossible to be published, so I was writing only for myself.

I didn't think I would be an exceptional writer, and I thought I might be a useful publisher. I've never regretted it.

It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it.

In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.

What's so useful about the British culture of politeness is the level of passive aggression is really fun to write.

I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

I'm sharpest early, and though I can rewrite any time, day or night, I'm useless after noon when it comes to writing first draft.

Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay.

The Christopher Robin who appears in so many of the poems is not always me. This was where my name, so totally useless to me personally, came into its own: it was a wonderful name for writing poetry round.

Nonfiction that uses novelistic devices and strategies to shape the work. That's material that I really like.

Richard Hoggart's cultural analysis 'The Uses of Literacy' was published in 1957, but its influence still hovers over anyone setting out to write seriously about people's affection for things that aren't serious, such as the products of pop culture.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.

I'm not really a 'puppet' person in particular; I think they are very theatrical, and I've found different uses for them in shows, but my true interest is in writing Broadway musicals.

Every writer uses his own way to motivate oneself.

The pen is an instrument of discovery rather than just a recording implement. If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out.