Quotes About Writing

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.

My writing is very organic. It's what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that's very essential to my being.

Writing is communication, not self-expression. Nobody in this world wants to read your diary except your mother.

My first notebook was a Big Five tablet, given to me [at age five] by my mother with the sensible suggestion that I stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.

I never saw any of my dad's stories. My mother said he had piles and piles of manuscripts.

Becoming a mother cannot help but change things. An author's life is reflected in their writing, whether they want it to be or not, and parenthood is one of the biggest life changes there is.

I think that an author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

When a scientist's son or daughter becomes a scientist they'll say "Wonderful! Wonderful!" So, why, in the name of God, would a mother be jealous to see her daughter become a successful writer?

I started writing letters home to my mother, saying that I wanted to come home, grandma won't let me sing.

I became a writer because I am the youngest of six children. I listen; I observe. I'm camouflaged as a moth. Mothers are unseen. It helps me write.

When my mother makes out her income tax return every year, under occupation she writes, eroding my daughter's self-esteem.

My mother always told me if you write about life, you will always be in the game. Just don't write songs write life. I decided to take her up on that.

People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk.

Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality.

When you are in deep distress and cannot restrain some expression of it, sit down and write out a harsh letter venting your anger. But don't send it.

I write to shed my sacred sorrows.

My passionate leisure pursuit are reading, wondering and writing.

I so desperately hate to end these movies that the first thing I do when I'm done is write another one. Then I don't feel sad about having to leave and everybody going away.

When I started writing, there was nothing about zombies. It was all teen movies, which to me are scarier than zombies, but that's another story.

I meet people who are in movies, and the stuff that they write is terrible, but nobody tells them that because they're famous. So I worry that my stuff might be like that, too.