Quotes About Writing

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place.

I definitely look up to Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, and J.K. Rowling.

I advise all my novel students to write in the company of 'Veronica Mars.'

I started my career as a novelist. 'Veronica Mars' was first imagined as a novel.

I feel for Veronica Mars so much when I'm watching at home. It is a wonderful story. The writing is consistently funny, biting, charming, heart-wrenching, etc. I also like the look of it. The cinematography - different from any other show.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.

When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty - if we don't understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it's like hearing music.

I couldn't believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.

Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, 'Crank,' with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

Because I was writing verse, my instructor suggested I study Shakespeare. The Shakespeare teacher insisted you couldn't understand the text without seeing it on its feet.

I think that 'Prayers' is a really interesting one because we wrote it well before the border crisis was happening, and in that first verse, I was actually writing about the experience of me and my wife's relationship and finding someone who you feel safe with and you relate to and can ponder existence with.

A lot of fans have been requesting that in-your-face song, a sense of feeling empowered. And 'Good Woman' is that: a relatable song celebrating the good woman. I'm also really proud of the third verse, which I wrote.