Quotes About Writing

Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith.

Now I'm trying to work outside first person. I do plan to write more books.

My lab and academic work fill my day from about 9 am to 7 p.m. Then I zoom out the lens to work on my other writing.

The title always comes last. What I really work hard on is the beginning. Where do you begin? In what tone do you begin? I almost have to have a scene in my mind.

So I work hard to present the human side of my characters while not neglecting the plot.

Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.

That's the interesting thing about writing. You can start late, you can be ignorant of things, and yet, if you work hard and pay attention you can do a good job of it.

The real skill of being a writer is being able to take your inspired moments, and make them work as a whole, through the unromantic, daily hard work.

I work seven days a week, from 9 in the morning till 8 at night. I have the titles of the next eight novels I want to write. I feel myself pitiable, degraded on a day that I don't write.

Fill your pages with details. Work hard to get the right word.

When I stepped from hard manual work to writing, I just stepped from one kind of hard work to another.

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

Just do it. Get it down on the page. Work hard. And then let go. Ask yourself why you want to write. You have to be clear about that.

I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.

I'm terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you've written something that doesn't work, it's a tough pill to swallow.

The stuff that I write doesn't work very well as background music. You have to watch it from beginning to end and pay attention as if you were watching a play.

Once when I went over my work with my Washington University professor, the late great Stanley Elkin, he pointed to a passage of mine and said: Stop vamping. It has remained a caution.

Ultimately a historian has to put together a cohesive work. That doesn't mean that your curiosity is ever totally satisfied.

Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.

So that's why one of my rules of parody writing is that it's gotta be funny regardless of whether you know the source material. It has to work on its own merit.

I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.

Few authors are so interesting as their work - they generally reserve their wit or trenchant sarcasm for their books.

Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?