Quotes About Writing

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

I'd love to work on a script in collaboration.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Self-knowledge is essential not only to writing, but to doing almost anything really well. It allows you to work through from a deep place - from the deep, dark corners of your subconscious mind.

I always work from an outline, so I know all the of the broad events and some of the finer details before I begin writing the book.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind - and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.

Currently I am working on another three books, doing a lot of magazine work, am shooting for fifteen stock agencies, plus my own photo library - all this keeps me quite busy!

I never work from an outline, and often I dont know how the story will end.

Normally I work out a general summary of what I mean to do, then start writing, and the details can be different from my anticipation. So there is considerable flow, but always within channels.

I have made three rules of writing for myself that are absolutes: Never take advice. Never show or discuss work in progress. Never answer a critic.

My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.

To my mind, the prose in a non-fiction work that's going to endure has to be of the same quality as the prose in a work of fiction that endures.

There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.

The reason I started writing movies was because I kept getting parts that I just kind of stepped into. I didn't have to do a lot of work and I ended up getting sort of bored.

I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.

The first newspaper I worked on was the 'Springfield Union' in Springfield, Massachusetts. I wrote over a hundred letters to newspapers asking for work and got three responses, two no's.

The best way to learn to write is to study the work of the men and women who are doing the kind of writing you want to do.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

Start early and work hard. A writer's apprenticeship usually involves writing a million words (which are then discarded) before he's almost ready to begin. That takes a while.

Writing is hard. I learned how to work hard from wrestling, not English courses.

If you do a scene and you really like a character in it or a premise in it to write it down and to work on it so that you can have five or six characters that you can pull out in an audition.

It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.