Quotes About Writing

Back to work. If I'm [writing] I'm not thinking about the crazy.

I've written some great things. That's a gift, but there's consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

Never use 'submit' as a verb for sending work to magazine or book publishers; say 'offer,' and never, ever submit. Keep your knees unbent. Be brave.

For example, many colleges in their writing programs teach some of my work.

The only literary men are those who have to work at it.

I actually was a writer who had the ability to perform his own work as opposed to a comedian who wrote his own material. So that really made me happy and changed my whole perspective.

I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I've got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?

I'm very happy - if I can do even a little bit of work to get the short story out more, I'm thrilled.

I think the path for a young writer might be one that says, "I have to accept myself, this is what I am. I can't eradicate my defects. I can work on them."

The greatest thing about writing a book is that at first it's all inchoate, but the more you work on it, the more the book teaches you its internal rules.

Some of our writers are starting to incorporate elements of social media, etc. in the work itself, which is all for the good, I think - finding new ways of being poetic.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

It feels amazing to work with writers that write really well.

The challenge is always as a writer, is this going to work, because it's a very intimate process, and I tend to be very introverted and insular, and when I write, it's in my head.

As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.

Writing is not hard work, it is simply an obsession.

What I try to write about are the darkest things in the soul, the mortal dreads... The closer I get to the burning core of my being, the things which are most painful to me, the better is my work.

I generally concentrate on work for three or four hours every morning. I sit at my desk and focus totally on what I'm writing. I don't see anything else, I don't think about anything else.

I have to work really hard, eight shows a week, to get a nice check as an actor. But when I write a play, and it's a - knock wood - hit, the checks come in for many years.

I'm not much interested in prizes, whether from the Arab world or from the Western world. Writing is a very difficult process and I want to continue my work.

I lay off a lot modern fiction and only rely on living writers for non-fiction work.

Writing a biography is not a love affair. It's not a marriage. It's a job, it's a piece of work.

In labouring to be brief, I become obscure.

I have rituals for cleaning out resentments, disappointments, heartbreak, depression and for work. One of the things I do is go over old stuff if I have been unable to write for a while.