Quotes About Writing

Once the initial excitement wears off and it's time to sit down to write, the authors are usually still very eager, but the reality of doing the work can be a little daunting.

I still write what I need to write - but I can't deny that something has changed when I think about sending work out. Maybe it's just growing older and feeling more responsible to the world.

I know writers for whom the act of writing is a necessary chore. They suffer to write great work. I am very lucky that for me writing is a delight.

I do a nice sloppy first draft like everybody else. And then just work at it and work at it and groom it. I get input from other people.

Well, to aspiring writers, I would tell them that we live in a wonderful time where you're able to make your work visible, easily.

I work late at night. I'm awake and nobody bothers me. It's quiet and things come and talk to me in the silence.

I work on multiple projects at a time because it keeps me from getting writer's block.

I read all the time. People ask, 'Do you read while you work?' And I say, 'I better.' I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can't go that long without reading.

I don't plot the books out ahead of time, I don't plan them. I don't begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don't work with an outline and I don't work in a straight line.

Writing is work and cooking is relaxing.

I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence.

I think writers can get a little melodramatic sometimes about their work, and it helps me not to do that, to just say, "Well, this is how I make a living, and I need to become a very good craftsman."

I'm always doubting my work, even when people are kind enough to say good things. I still have a hard time believing I've written some books, let alone that they've actually done pretty well.

I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.

In Necessary Marriage, I tried to repeat entire phrases without the reader noticing. My work doesn't have the rigor of music, but I hope it alludes to it.

It's hard to think that say Shakespeare could have written "The Tempest" when he was young. It seems to be reflective work or retrospective work.

Usually I get up early every morning and from 6:00 to 10:00 I write. The rest of the time I study and prepare my work or I do other things. But four hours a day are exclusively devoted to writing.

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting.

I believe that - if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression - that you should take on this work like a holy calling.

I'd really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.

It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.

When people write to me with stories, they are never ones that work for me. There's something mysterious about which ones catch you.

I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.