Quotes About Writing

The longer we work on the show, the more the writers just start surprising you.

Editing is work, and it's hard to do while working on one's own writing.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

That's the way I work. I get it all plotted in my mind, and then I write it down.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.

Sometimes dreams show me that my writing should go deeper. Dreams have not so much changed my work as deepened it.

I work fitfully, in hope rather than in expectation, invent methods which last a week, and fill notebooks with tiny, illegible writing which often defies my own attempts to decipher it.

Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more.

I've always wanted to write comic books, my earliest memories are of waiting for Dad to come home from work, and, secreted in his lawyer's leather briefcase, would be comics from the store.

I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.

You want to make a representative selection, but at the same time, you want to give a sense of the whole project. I have this big conflict in my writing life that I'm trying to work out all the time.

there are people who read my work and accuse me of being political! As far as I'm concerned that's like accusing a dog of having a bark!

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

I have no writing habit. I work when I feel like it, and I work when I have to - mostly the latter.

I can do a book in three months if I spend all day, seven days a week at it and, in fact, I work better that way.

The alcohol had the code and mystery about it as a writer's drug, but I'm glad that's been debunked. But the trouble with the drinking, much as I hate to admit it, is it helped the work.

My focus has always been on the work - that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That's where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.

The funny thing is, about the time I let go of any aspiration toward worldly success, that's about the time I started writing decent work.

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow.

The vital accessories to my work are my reference books, such as the complete Shakespeare and a prayer book, and a large refuse bin.