Quotes About Writing

No, I don't harbor any mystical ideas about writing, Your Honor, it's work like any other kind of craft; the power of literature, I've always thought, lies in how willful the act of making it is.

Part of the work of writing a novel is to uncover the symmetries or connections that make it whole, which might not reveal itself at first.

I don't read other writers because I'm writing all the time. It's too disturbing to read a writer with a good style when you're in the middle of putting your work together.

I think most writers can't really think about their work without a kind of revulsion. And I think that's probably why we keep going back and trying again, trying to do better each time.

Don't write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that's not changing. Let that do the work.

Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.

Oulipo ends where the work begins.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

I start with voice, maybe a sentence. That sentence might embody an image, and I go from there. One sentence to the next. Sound drives the work these days - sound before description.

I need my trusty Mac laptop to write. I can't work with anything else. I'm used to the feel of the keys. I also like, more than anything else, Apple's Pages.

I always work from outline and almost always write out of sequence. It just works for me.

You have to write or else the auditioning process becomes so grueling because it's so hard to work.

Artists are expected to talk about their work but writers aren't expected to talk about their writing.

Most writers I know move back and forth between the rational and the intuitive, though there are some who approach writing very rationally, and others who claim not to think their work through.

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs.

I don't like to talk about work in progress, but the novel I'm working on now is definitely not horror.

The way I write is really like putting one foot in front of the other. I really let the characters do most of the work, they start talking and they just lead the way.

I feel it most in my work, because there aren't roles about women who are spiritually evolving. That anyone would even write something like that, something that's worth doing, would be a miracle!

I feel like I work on scripts for comedy as well as dramatic stuff the same.

The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.