Quotes About Writing

There may be fewer women historians writing on traditionally 'male' subjects, but they are outstanding in the field - like Margaret MacMillan.

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.

I've always had an abundance of material about the subjects of my biographies.

I'm open to writing just about anything. I love writing the books that I write. They do tend to be on dark subjects, but I don't think of myself necessarily as a dark-humored person. I like having a lot of fun.

There is, I think, great difficulty in writing of one's self: it is almost impossible to present subjects where the chief actor must be conspicuous and not seem to be, or really be, egotistical.

I write plays about big, intense subjects.

I've always believed that you write to discover what you think. On most subjects, if I'm asked what do I think about them, I'd say I don't know, I'll have to write them down.

There are many roads to journalism. My feeling is that your best bet in college is to study the subjects you will want to write about, whether politics, the environment or the law.

You think you choose the subjects of your books. But sometimes, in ways you don't know, the books choose you.

I knew that you couldn't make a living simply writing about the outdoors, so I made an effort from the beginning of my freelance career to write about other subjects.

Nearly all interested parties think I write too shortly on the subjects that interest them most.

If you see in all my books, I have two key intentions. One is obviously to entertain and make sure that the reader has a good reading experience. I also try to write on subjects that nobody has dealt with before to make my works different from other page turners.

I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one would write it just the way I do. It's very individual: a child could write the same story as somebody else, but it wouldn't come out the same.

I established my first writing routine when I was 13. The school year had just ended, and I'd won a stack of books for being the best student in a number of subjects. The pile included several 60-leaved notebooks that I decided to fill with short stories.

I do like to write about dark subjects.

Whenever you write for someone else, you're always aware - sometimes overtly, other times at an almost cellular, subliminal level - of the rules about what you can and can't do.

When I first have an idea, I'll spit-ball it with my husband: he's my beautiful ideas sounding board. I usually have a year deadline from start to finish, so I'll piss about for three months and pretend to get started. Then there's four to six months of actual writing and, after that, submissions, edits, and eventually a finished product.

What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader's part.

When I was 20, I wrote a film on spec and sent it to the BBC. They wrote back, 'Usually, when we reject submissions, we like to offer some encouragement, but in your case, we don't see any point in you continuing.' I took it as encouragement anyway, thinking that only people who write terrible things are capable of writing great things.

I didn't have any writer friends in college. I was a computer science major, but I was writing a lot, probably more than anybody I knew. I started to submit novels to New York when I was a freshman in college.

When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as 'E.L.' But if I were starting out today, I would use my first name.

For over a year I continued to submit mss, and have them rejected - the last few with rejection letters indicated the story was pretty good, but I was American.

It was all a back-handed blessing, and my friends were the ones who kept the faith, read my work, and urged me to submit it to publishers (by sending it out for me - they would not hear no for an answer.