Quotes About Writing

A manuscript under way always gave me something to do; only while enduring the aimlessness between books was I truly glum.

I wrote 'All is Lost' while editing 'Margin Call'. I did that long before I knew if I was ever going to get to make another movie.

I would love to write more about my hardboiled gumshoe on Mars, Alex Lomax.

As Tolkien points out, the name is "a pleasantly ingenious pun," referring to those who "dabble in ink." It also suggests people "with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas.

Polly finished her huge narrative during the summer term. The day after she had finished it, she went round with the oddest mixture of feelings, pride at having got it done, sick of the sight of it and glad it was over, and completely lost without it.

I hate dialect. It gets in the way. If there is a need for dialect, you can render it quite easily by reproducing the rythm of that form of speech. Then you don't need to bother with silly spellings

If you annoy me, watch out! I shall put you in a book as a baddie and then make people laugh at you.

Writing, which is my form of celebration and prayer, is also my form of inquiry.

At any rate, after five years Surak came out of the wilds, took a small apartment in the capital, near his parents' house, and began to write for the information networks.

Writing tales of horror makes it hard to convince people that I'm a nice, gentle person. I love rainbows and wildflowers and butterflies and babies, and I wouldn't swat a fly unless it was diving directly into my fruit salad.

I reached for the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course.

My study throngs with characters waiting to be written. Imaginary people, anxious for a life, who tug at my sleeve, crying, 'Me next! Go on! My turn!' I have to select. And once I have chosen, the others lie quiet for ten months or a year, until I come to the end of the story, and the clamor starts up again.

Readers, continued Miss Winter, are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. That's why I couldn't have journalists and biographers rummaging around in my past, retrieving bits and pieces of it, preserving it in their words. To write my books, I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.

At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it.

But perhaps the answer is to stop writing altogether, for when I do write, even now as I write this very sentence, this very word, I am aware of a ghost reader who leans over my shoulder watching my pen, who twists my words and perverts my meaning, and makes me uncomfortable in the privacy of my own thoughts. It is very aggravating to be presented to oneself in a light so different from the familiar one, even when it is clearly a false light. I will not write any more.

Readers,' continued Miss Winter, 'are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay.

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours.

Cuando escribo, incluso ahora mientras estoy escribiendo esta frase, esta palabra, soy consciente de la presencia de un lector fantasma que se inclina sobre mi hombro y contempla mi pluma, que tergiversa mis palabras y distorsiona mi significado, haciéndome sentir incómoda incluso en la intimidad de mis propios pensamientos.

To write is to feel the dance of your soul swirling in a dream that drips imagination onto paper.

Dianne Jacob

Exercise the muscles that compassionately open the heart. In your writing and your life.

Dinty W. Moore

My job is not to just set down events that happened to me. My job is to create an experience for a reader." —Mary Karr

The writer of nonfiction might be starting with events that really happened, but recreating them is an imaginative feat. Ordering them is an imaginative feat. Making sense of them is an imaginative feat." —Robin Hemley