Quotes About Writing

I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

Writing is thinking and thinking is hard work.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.

People think my work is therapeutic. I don't see it that way. It's not like I'm saving money from a weekly therapy visit by writing down my life.

Writing is a consciousness formally at work in the territory of the imaginary.

Writing is not the easiest way to make a living. Your work long hours, usually all by yourself. It is not a way to make money.

It seems the best work I do is when I am really allowing the unconscious to rule the page and then later I can go back and hack around and make sense of things.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.

A change of work is a good rest for the mind if you're constantly focused on writing. I like to work with timber and be creative on that side sometimes as well.

Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own.

The admiration of another writer's work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

Try to develop actual work habits, and even though you have a busy life, try to reserve an hour, say - or more - a day to write. Some very good things have been written on an hour a day.

What is a historian? Someone who doesn't write well enough to work on a daily.

All of my wildness is in the writing. I have discovered I have to be orderly and boring in my personal life to be wild in my work.

I've never had to work out of the arts. I've always either been a writer or an editor, or something where I've made my living from doing what I love. You can't get any better than that.

Writing is hard work, and fun, and requires you to keep your backside in a chair when you would sometimes like to put it elsewhere. So the only wisdom is the advice to keep at it, I guess.

[The writer] wants both to do the best possible work and also to reach the largest possible audience. The result is a fairly normal condition of discouragement.

A sitcom is the closest thing for me to doing stage because you work in front of an audience, and if it's well written it can be very satisfying.

I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.

I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.