Quotes About Writing

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.

I would like you to believe that I kept working out of some real professionalism, to meet the deadline, but that would not be entirely true; I did have a deadline, but it was also a troubled time, and working did to the trouble what gin did to the pain.)

Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on 'Midnight Confessions and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means.

I'm only myself in front of my typewriter.

I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.

Length is weight in fiction, pretty much.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

I once asked a young dissertation writer whether her suddenly grayed hair was due to ill health or personal tragedy; she answered: "It was the footnotes".

If you can still write in spite of the fact that you're not getting paid, that nobody cares about what you're writing, that nobody wants to publish it, that everybody is telling you to do something else, and you still want to and you still enjoy it and you can't stop doing it...then you're a writer.

Mas, ou muito me engano, ou acabo de escrever um capítulo inútil.

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

All writers start with a layer of truth, don't they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

You can be a writer who doesn't read everyday. But you're not fooling anyone. It shows, rather embarrassingly, in your work.

Ninety percent of my work is crap, " he continued. "Another nine percent is mediocre, and then there are those rare gems that are actually useable.

There is a certain type of greasy hair that you get only when you are writing with no breaks.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

Writing is communication, and you don't know how you're doing until you put it in front of someone else's eyes. You also learn from critiquing other writers' work.

Be patient, work hard and consistently, have faith in your writing, and don't be afraid to listen to constructive criticism.

You don't knock television, even if you don't always like what they make of your work. It makes all the difference between being an also-ran writer and very famous.

I consider myself a writer. I always wanted to act, and as a teen, I studied acting devotedly. Eventually, I got writing work, but very little acting work.

I usually get up between 7 A.M. and 8 A.M., have coffee, and go right to work. It's really important not to get sidetracked in the morning so I'm still in that dreamy state for my writing.

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.