Quotes About Writing

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

I tend not to think about the reading public at all, or the business, when I'm writing.

I don't think an actor's job is to be recognized. I think an actor's job is to facilitate the writing in a way that changes the way people think. No other business does that.

People might think writing is a hard business, but it's nowhere near acting.

The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so.

As writers, we live very much in our own minds much of the time, buzzing in our unconscious spaces as we go about the business of living in the world.

When I'm writing in long hand, it just goes on and on and on. When I was in the saloon business, I would just greet people and talk to them and avoid taxes, and getting behind the bar. What else.

I've been able to write at least one book a year for 20 years, and I don't think I would've had that kind of drive if I hadn't come out of the journalism business.

The whole business of reading English Literature in two years, to know it in any reputable sense of the word - let alone your learning to write English - is, in short, impossible.

Publishing is a business and writing is an art. The two have to be crammed together despite the clearly different motivations behind them.

Writing and achieving your goals is not failure, not having a goal to write in the first place is the start of failure.

I'm not good at happy, lightweight kind of music. I'm not really good at pop music. "Cars" is probably the only true pop song I ever wrote. I wish I could write more, but I'm not very good at it.

Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It's almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.

I can't listen to music when I'm writing. I like music best in a car or on the train.

It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.

I did not have a chance to write novels until my youngest child started school fulltime

I don't write with any audience in mind. I just write. I take a chance on the audience. That's what I did originally, and I think it's worked--in the sense that I find there is an audience.

Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer.

You can borrow my Blackbird, if you like,' said Ben. This was his new fountain pen, which troubled him. It was guaranteed not to leak, but writers and schoolchildren knew better. Ben wished to be relieved of the responsibility of the Blackbird, without losing his own dignity.

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others.

Two books under my belt, some controversial journalism, a reputation for contentious provocative attention-seizing writing. I had something of a name. If feminism had been around then I'd have taken it up, I suppose; it would have needed me. As it was, I never felt its absence; being a woman seemed to me a valuable extra asset.

When we are married - and we will be married, I know we will, I see the long years of our marriage ahead like a great spacious welcoming firelit room - when we are married we shall have a house in London because I want to show you off. I want to wave you around in pride. We'll have that - but we'll also have Porlock, or somewhere like Porlock because we're going to want to be alone, and work, and shut the door on people...

When a writer tells you his novel has received mixed reviews, it means that after his book was trashed and his heart broken in every newspaper and magazine in America, the weekend critic at the Pekin Daily Times said it was a heart-pounding race to the finish.