Quotes About Writing

I do not believe that I will ever write an adult novel from an animal's point of view unless someday it becomes suddenly appealing to me to make a narrator a mentally ill pet. Never say never.

I often will write a scene from three different points of view to find out which has the most tension and which way I'm able to conceal the information I'm trying to conceal. And that is, at the end of the day, what writing suspense is all about.

In the past few years it had become a rare luxury for all of them to be together at once, especially since Daisy stayed in America with her husband, Matthew, for long periods of time. The trips were necessary for both of them: Matthew was a successful business entrepreneur, and Daisy was a successful novelist with a publisher in New York as well as London.

Writing books about whores... I'll bet you newer... joined giblets wiv a man in your lily-white life.' Dr. Hindley and Worthy began to reprove him, but Sara smiled quizzically. ' "Joined giblets?" ...I've never heard it put that way before.

The main thing is finding the time to sit down and write. You have to make the time.

O is a story about how being born, writing, reading and loving as a female is a fall into alignment with the minor time of a nilling. It is also a story about the way resistance animates the figure of an obscenely overdetermined identification with abolishment. We cannot know if the abolishment is of the female, of the identification or of the will. Her figure keeps moving.

Reading unfolds like a game called 'I,' in public gardens in good weather, in a series of worn-down hotel rooms, in museums in winter, where 'I' is the composite figure who is going to write but hasn't yet.

Truly I never thought of myself as writing legal thrillers, and I still don't think I do. I write stories about women.

I have written all of them' She shows me her work, while I look down in wonder. 'These pages, by the beginning letter of the surname.' She turns to a page with R, which is a letter I know, there at the top, she reads off, 'Amalee August Rain.' I sit down beside her and she gives it over to me, an I turn through all the pages. 'I'll be,' I whisper. 'A book of lost friends.

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

I think the internet is a great marketing tool--but marketing is not my job. I'm a writer. My job is to write novels.

I write what I want to write. Period. I don't write novels-for-hire using media tie-in characters, I don't write suspense novels or thrillers. I write horror. And if no one wants to buy my books, I'll just keep writing them until they do sell--and get a job at Taco Bell in the meantime.

I write horror because I enjoy it. I'm endlessly fascinated by the supernatural, by death, by darkness. And, to be honest, I don't have much choice. This is the way my mind works.

I'd love to write about my growing sexual awareness, but the press would turn it into something squalid.

in the last few years American poetry has come out of a poetry of complaint, not praising, and it was initially maybe rich. And it can continue to be rich if we remember that we shouldn't write out of complaint. We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich, ecstatic. But grievance is not -- it's a complaint, it's whining.

It's just time: the book I read, the letter I write, the window I look out of. Just a sleeve I keep trying to mend, the spool diminishing. Just my one hand writing words, my other hand weighing the silences between them. — Li-Young Lee, from "Cloudy Mirror: A Forward," The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon & Schuster, 1995)

The secret to those who write is that they come to the art simply because they cannot speak.

All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

Sit down every day and DO IT. Writing is a self-taught craft; the more you work at it, the more skilled you become. And when you're not writing, READ.

Many of the kids coming into my classes at the university are all but illiterate. You give them a page to read and they can't tell you what's on it. Try teaching them the classics, and they can't pronounce the words. Ask them to write about something, and they can't make complete sentences - much less spell anything over two syllables.

I cannot emphasize enough that I do not start with a plan or agenda and mechanically manipulate characters and events to carry it out. I set characters in motion, and let them teach me what the book is.

I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better when you can get it.

I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic.