Quotes About Writing

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

My work holds up the mirror to hypocrisy, which puts me in a tradition of American writing that reaches back to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Yes, sometimes I think that all my writing is nothing more than the compensatory work of a frustrated painter.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

I think it's difficult to be honest about certain aspects of my work without acknowledging that I have experienced or felt or questioned certain of the themes in the books.

It's really important to me to keep growing as a writer, to look for new challenges and be harshly critical of my own work in order to learn and tell better stories.

The problem with writing a monthly book is that you're going through your work like a man running for a bus, red-faced and out of breath. There isn't time for reflection or critical self-examination.

Writing is such a singular and lonely occupation. And it's interesting; all of the work that you create is so singular.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

Ben Bova seems to work very hard at working in new discoveries into his Glum Future but alas, his future is glum and not that well written.

I have a number of writers I work with regularly. I write an outline for a book. The outlines are very specific about what each scene is supposed to accomplish.

If you're a writer, you have to be an egomaniac. You have to just believe in yourself, which is hard work.

It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing

I don't work on poems and essays at once. They walk on different legs, speak with different tongues, draw from different parts of the psyche. Their paces are also different.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

There are no real guidelines or maps in Australia as to how to write a show, whereas in Hollywood it's where the TV industry is created and there's a lot of work that goes into development.

We don't work in the traditional TV format where we're like writing concurrently to shooting. Like, we really view it as a large feature film.

As a writer, if you're prepared to work from your own wound, you're allowing people into the most vulnerable parts of yourself.

I only work on my books at nights and at weekends. It is really just like a hobby.

When I'm blogging, I think book writing is easier and vice versa. Writing is lonely work, and the good thing about blogging is that you have immediate feedback from commenters.

Screenplays are the hardest thing to try to get right. They look so simple when they work, but they really destroy your brain cells trying to get them there.

The stories tend to be what I work on when I'm stuck. Something will just pop into my head and I'll think that's more of a story.

Whatever a writer gets paid for his book, it's never enough. I think that's true. It's hard work. But in the end, you wrote a book. It's something real and tangible that sits on a shelf forever.