Quotes About Writing

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.

It's often wrong to write for specific actors because one ends up using what is least interesting about them, their mannerisms and habits. I prefer not to write for specific people.

Melody was banned from music by the composers of the avant-garde. I was unique among them in always using and writing melody and so I think this is why I've shared my music, why they can have also pleasure, not only an interesting structure.

The old handbook on writing is 'Write what you know.' I come from an autobiographical starting place almost all of the time, but it would be a mistake to presume that I'm not using fiction to extend the narrative.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged.

I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me.

I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.

I've always written very tightly, and there's a good reason for that. There's no point in using words that you're not going to apply.

Today I start a diary; it is against my usual habbits, but out of a clearly felt need.

The usual way - through a long series of rejections, revising my manuscripts, and kept trying again and again. Finally I was fortunate enough to find a good agent.

I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.

The Q I loathe and despise, the Q every single writer I know loathes and despises, is this one: 'Where,' the reader asks, 'do you get your ideas?' It's a simple question, and my usual response is a kind of helpless, 'I don't know.'

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.

When I got out of the Army, I started writing the usual 'Catcher in the Rye' imitations, and then I wrote something that was done Off-Off Broadway in a theater. It was called 'What Else Is There?' and it was four or five people playing missiles in a silo waiting to take off.

A photo app is a utility. It's like comparing 'Twitter' to Microsoft Word. If you want to be an author, you're not always going to constrain yourself to 140 characters.

Words are powerful. The tongue is powerful. And when you write it down, and record it, and press it up, it's 100 million times more powerful. It's important to utilize our tongue to help people.

Who on earth is going to use 'utilize' in a text message, a whopping seven characters including the always-hard-to-type 'z,' when you can say the exact same thing in three characters? I can't think of a sentence in which 'use' can't replace 'utilize.'

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.

To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.

I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.

By embracing a label such as 'non-fiction,' the creative writing community has signaled to the world that what goes on in this genre is at best utilitarian and at worst an utter mystery. We have segregated the genre from art.