Quotes About Writing

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Experience as much as you can and absorb a lot of reality. Otherwise, your writing will have the force of a Wiffle ball.

At times I enjoy writing and at others times I just hate it because it's definitely having to go back and experience some pain and express what you really feel.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

Isn't every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn't there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.

There's no better reading experience than going to the place where a text was written.

The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light - and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau - into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience.

Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.

I enjoy writing but I much prefer the experience of having written.

Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.

We write from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. We paint those qualities which we do not posses.

I wouldn't describe that "position" as "parasitic." I'd describe that experience as "edifying." I don't merely write from a critical intellectual distance. I actually live around here.

Of course one never knows in draft if it's going to turn out, even with my age and experience.

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

The female experience is different from that of the male, and if, as a male writer, you cannot accept that basic premise, then you will never, ever, be able to write women well.

My boarding school experience was the only thing I had strong enough feelings to write about for hundreds and hundreds of pages. I can still smell the formaldehyde of the fetal pigs in biology.

One of the wonderful things about being a writer is that you're constantly dredging up some arcane knowledge or long-forgotten experience, rediscovering old passions and interests.

Once you get into the book, you've got to constantly find your - the rhythm of your prose. And it ends up being quite a musical experience either way.

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

I feel I've always been writing about self-identity. How do we become who we are? So I'm just writing from experience what's concerned me.

Well, my background is journalism. I don't have any creative-writing experience except for one class I took as a sophomore in college.