Quotes About Writing

I remember going over proofs of this book - my first book - back in 2001, in a bar in Toronto called the 'Victory Cafe', and thinking sadly to myself, 'This is a very good manuscript but not a very good book.' I don't know what I meant by that, but I was pretty heartbroken and sure it was true.

As a media member, my goal is to inform the American fans of persons of character. It's a joy for me, either writing a good story or telling a story on video.

I don't look at it as writing a book in a videogame universe. I look at it as writing for 'Halo', which for me, transcends being just a great video game. It's evolving into a whole new mythology.

I used to work in the video game industry before I became a full-time writer.

I was a huge fan of video games; I wanted to write something, and I saw the tools at my fingertips to upload a video to my audience, and that's why I'm here today. I think that freedom and the lack of gatekeepers, combined with people's passion, is what really the true spirit of Internet geekdom is about.

A big reason why I started writing is I felt that fiction had stopped evolving. All other entertainments were getting better, constantly, as technology allowed. Movies. Video games. Music.

As writers, we have to make our own work - as bloggers, writing for video games, whatever we can do. Everyone breaks into the business in a different way.

It's weird that, in a way, by writing about video games, I get to develop them, too.

I love the beautiful distractions of the world - television and movies, video games, the Internet in general. But I try really hard to avoid them, because they don't help me become a better writer. They subtract hours from my day. And a writer's main currency is time. Time to daydream, time to walk and think, time to sit and do the work.

Writing for videogames is really unique. You learn all the rules of writing, but there's a whole other set of rules for game writing, and we're changing them as we move along as well, which makes it more challenging.

For all the power of video and film, I am not giving up my pen. I am just much more likely to try to link essays to webcasts or videos. The best way for these two media to move forward, to inform and make change, is in tandem; together they are more than the sum of their parts.

If you watch home videos, at 4 years old, I was doing nothing but being the entertainer. Singing 'Boot Scootin' Boogie' in the living room. Then, I guess, just by the grace of God I started writing songs, and somebody happened to like them.

I am not so secretly a comedian. I write a lot of my own material if you've seen videos I've done. I write jokes.

One of the most positive takeaways I've had from 'SNL' is when we'd make videos back in the day: we'd just write material as we were inspired, and so, in a given year, we'd only put out two or three videos.

I write really visually. In my head, I'm constantly picturing things as I'm writing, so for me, videos are such an expressive part of my job.

The biggest idea of a good time for me is making the Batman videos that we did. That is my ideal day. That is exactly what I want to be doing... I like doing cartoons. I like writing things.

I'm going to be writing and directing my own videos, and performing in them too, and I'm super-excited about it.

At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.

For me, the passing of time has provided me with subjects I never had before. Subjects I can now look at from a historical perspective. Like the anti-communist era in America. I lived through that. I was a boy; I didn't find a way to write about it until many years later. The same with the Vietnam War.

It definitely takes a long time, because Umbrella Academy' scenes are very interesting from a writing point of view with all these very off-the-cuff, oddball characters who are all different from each other.

My readers often tell me that what they admire about my books is my ability to write from so many points of view. My challenge to myself is whether I'll ever be able to write a novel just from one point of view. It seems impossible.

The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.