Quotes About Writing

I've written for every medium except poetry, at which I suck.

Every time I got 'Amazing Spider-Man' or 'Fantastic Four' or another book firmly on the rails, we got pulled into some big event book or crossover and it cost momentum and messed badly with the pacing and structure of the book.

I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.

Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.

Writers write for various reasons. I write because my heart demands so. There is so much freedom in the simple act of sitting there, holding up my hands, waiting to pound on the computer keyboard, waiting for words to pour from the tips of my fingers and compose the melody of life from the faded tapestry of my past.

The ancient Hebrews did not write the name of God. I often wish the Christians would follow suit, as never was a word more misused in writing and speaking than the name of the Lord.

The best grammarian still can't write a verse.

You made your students write stories about happiness and they were, you said, the worst stories of the year.

When he traveled, he was writing. When he was at the pub, he was writing. He would stop in the middle of a staircase or a crowded street to write. When he ran out of paper, he would write on his shirt cuffs. He was always writing. He was one of the most prolific writers who ever lived. A hundred books, thousands of essays, hundreds of poems.

It's called a pen. It's like a printer, hooked straight to my brain.

Memory implies that there is some static time and place you can go back to, whereas if you relive it by trying to put yourself back in that context, its more nuanced, less black and white. More traumatic, but also more exciting. When I knew I had to write about things that would be painful, I put off doing it for ages. But then eventually the fear of not doing it becomes greater than the fear of doing it.

Quotes › Authors › D › Damian Barr › The stories we tell ourselves about... The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s.

I think the secret of memoirs is keeping those parts of yourself off the page, which makes what you do share more valuable.

The idea that writers write books that have absolutely nothing to do with their personalities or lives, I think, is false. Your raw material is yourself. There is nothing else to draw on.

van Vogt is not a giant as often maintained. He's only a pygmy using a giant typewriter

On a blazing, dusty street corner in the broken city, he took the chapbook out of his coat pocket, and slid off the strap. He found his pen – an antique plunger-action fountain, for his traditionalist tastes applied as much to the means of marking as what should be marked – and began to write.

It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again.

I write because I read. I imagine many of us are this way, bewildered in the tangle of these activities: writing to understand how better to read, reading to understand how better to write."-Dan Beachy-Quick

For me, the joy of writing is the exploration of ideas, whether that be science, religion, history, or philosophy. I think a great story is one that entertains, educates, and inspires, all at the same time.

I don't think anyone wants to write a book that people don't like, but you have to write the book you want to write. You have to be true to yourself and hope that people will respond to that.

I spend my life essentially alone at a computer. That doesn't change. I have the same challenges every day.

This nonsense about writers who are boozers and conceive their best work while half-jacked is simply crap. No writer can write drunk. It's impossible.

Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance.

My name is A.J. and I hate school. If you ask me, they shouldn't teach kids how to read and write in school. They shouldn't teach math. They should teach kids how to do tricks on their bikes. That's what I want to learn!