Quotes About Writing

I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.

Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.

The story is always better than your ability to write it. My belief about this is that if you ever get to the point that you think you've done a story justice, you're in the wrong business.

If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I've written, I feel the day hasn't been totally wasted.

If you don't have a sensation of apprehension when you set out to find a story and a swagger when you sit down to write it, you are in the wrong business.

A writer's occupational hazard: I think of eavesdropping as minding my business.

Keep an idea log where you write everything down, even the bad ideas.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

If I wasn't a trader, I would probably be in the film business in some capacity and writing in some other form. I went to NYU Film School and London Film School.

For me, it's always been the initial business - just getting a word down, any words down, on a blank piece of paper. Once I've done that, I'm away. Beginning is one half of the deed.

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.

If you can't write like New York, you have no business living in New York and making New York the locale of your stories.

Do not address your readers as though they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your copy, they are alone. Pretend you are writing to each of them a letter on behalf of your client.

I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business. The day you die.

I hold that the parentheses are by far the most important parts of a non-business letter.

Do you remember when they taught cursive in schools? I think they don't anymore. But I still enjoy it - just the physical act and all the - the whole business of making a thing out of language.

I'd like to see myself married with a child and hopefully still involved in the entertainment business as an actor who is also able to write a bit and direct some projects.

I think editors are excellent marketers. They know their audience and produce copy to appeal to them - they just don't call it marketing.

No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.

Writing is a hard business...but nothing makes you feel better.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.