Quotes About Writing

To say that I enjoyed writing... is like saying I enjoy having fingers and toes. It's difficult to imagine life without them.

In 1989 I retired from Bell Laboratories to become a full-time writer. Not that I didn't enjoy my engineering career, but rather I liked being a novelist just a bit better.

There seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to why one day snatching the correct words from the ether was like opening a faucet and other days it was like opening a vein

You should write because some stray scrap of your soul is trying to manifest itself verbally.

My only regret is to die four pages too soon.

He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I'm not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place. Dominic Wheatley, 2013

I wrote about the night bird cries, the sea sounds and the lonely barking, and I liked what I wrote in flashes; but something was wrong with it. There is always something wrong with writing. So I tore the paper up at last, liking the untouched memory so much better, not wanting it forced into the insincerity of words.

It was not Monsieur Arouet, but a colleague of his—a lady novelist—who remarked to me once that writing novels was a cannibal's art, in which one often mixed small portions of one's friends and one's enemies together, seasoned them with imagination, and allowed the whole to stew together into a savory concoction.

There's a little trick called the Rule of Three: if you use any three of the five senses, it will make the scene immediately three-dimensional.

Una dama novelista me dijo una vez, que escribir novelas era arte de caníbales, pues uno mezcla con frecuencia pequeñas porciones de sus amigos y sus enemigos, los sazona con imaginación y permite que todo eso se cocine en un sabroso guiso

If you can't look a line of dialogue in the face and say exactly why it's there—take it out or change it.

Don't go overboard in avoiding "said." Basically, "said" is the default for dialogue, and a good thing, too; it's an invisible word that doesn't draw attention to itself.

The simple act of writing Fraser's name had given him a sense of connexion, and he realized that the desperate need for such connexion was what had driven him to write it.

After all, it's human nature to put the best face on things when you know someone will read what you've written. People tend to concentrate on the things they think important, and often enough, they tidy it up a bit for public consumption.

Conflict and character are the heart of good fiction, and good mystery has both of those in spades.

You don't need to know the purpose as you write, but when you read over something you've written, you should be able to point to any given element—be that a line of dialogue, a descriptive phrase, a plot point—and say why it's there.

Pointing out the emotion in a scene is like laughing at your own jokes.

This is why you use imagery when writing about sex; it's a means both of evoking immediacy and of distilling emotion.

writing novels was a cannibal's art, in which one often mixed small portions of one's friends and one's enemies together, seasoned them with imagination, and allowed the whole to stew together into a savory concoction.

Diana Gabaldon

heads that edged the huge fireplace, and I

I have been in perturbation of mind for days, debating whether I shall write it, and now, having written, whether to send it.

Aside from the Rizzoli & Isles books, there are many other stories I want to write. The question is whether I'll live long enough to write them all!

A writer who isn't writing is asking for trouble.