Quotes About Writing

Long before we ever heard about hip-hop in L.A., I was writing rhymes. It

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

You know how it is with writing. You just write what you want to write. There's no way to predict what is good or bad. You just do what you think is funny, and either it works or you're finished. It's impossible to predict anything.

In The Touch, the love scenes are the same as they were in The Thorn Birds or anything else I've ever written. I find a way of saying that either it was heaven or hell but in a way that still leaves room for the reader to use their own imagination.

Q: Why write about slavery? Haven't we had enough stories about slavery? Why do we need another one? A: I could have written about upper middle class white people who feel sad sometimes, but there's a lot of competition.

Good writing is not shaped solely by words, but by the contexts, feelings, and hardships from which such words originate.

My next task entails me officially binding myself to my writings and my mission. I must find a suitable way in which to do so.

Please World, just let me write in peace.

The best and worst of writing is that it could always be better.

The most skilled of writing always stems from that which is not so.

To be a writer is to gouge out one's mind, heart and soul and splatter them across the page for the world to judge.

To write well you must both know of the world and the greater message you wish to share with the world beyond that which you write.

Maybe I write because I've learned to show certain parts of my heart on the page that I still struggle to capture in speech.

[W]riting is a product of silence and solitude.

President Clinton signed a $10 million deal to write a book by 2003. Isn't that amazing? Yes, and get this, not only that, President Bush signed a $10 million deal to read a book by 2003.

If I don't write it, they can't buy it.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?

When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?" Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?" You don't get ideas. Ideas get you.

I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasion—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there's no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer's sensibility on the reader's most private space.

Ernest Hemingway once advised prose artists to 'Write hard and clear about what hurts.

The most common prepositional error is forgetting that the noun or pronoun in a prepositional phrase is the object of the preposition. The object of the preposition must be expressed in the objective case. Who can forget Jane Russell's line, in a 1970s Playtex ad, for a bra "for we full-figured gals." The preposition for mandates the pronoun us. But, then, Russell never was known for her pronouns.