Quotes About Writing

In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending.

All poets who, when reading from their own works,m experience a choked feeling, are major. For that matter, all poets who read from their own works are major, whether they choke or not.

Anybody who has had experience of poetesses knows that they may forgive a punch on the jaw, but never a suggestion that they would be wiser to give up versifying.

My accountancy experience could come in handy if ever I find myself in the right position. For now, I'm very happy to write.

I've found that writing novels is an all-absorbing experience - both physical and mental - and I have to do it every day in order to keep the rhythm, to keep myself focused on what I'm doing.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

That's the wonderful thing about drama and writing and fiction: it's this wonderful shared experience that we all have. We can see into each other's lives.

I've always written stuff based on personal experience, but I've always disguised it by the use of characters.

One of the most important things as a writing instructor is to provide a lot of different entry points to subjects. To not impose your own personal experience as the One True Way.

For me writing isn't a mental exercise, it's barely even a literary exercise, it feels like a spiritual experience.

All experience helps when you write.

Writing is one of the main ways that I process the experience.

But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.

I have wanted to write from a young age, but working with so many gifted authors and editors over the years has taught me so much. I doubt I would be where I am today without that amazing experience.

As soon as you become a writer, you lose contact with ordinary experience or tend to. ... the worst fate of a writer is to become a writer.

I'm always looking at ways of shaking up the writing experience because I think it helps.

Anyway, in my writing I've always been interested in finding places to stand, and I've found it very useful to have a direct experience of what I'm writing about.

What I write is emotionally honest and truthful as the human experience can be, to make people feel less alone, or at least that's the hope.

I had cancer for fourteen months and wrote a memoir about the experience.

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

[Y]ou have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

By the end of the first decade of writing, I considered myself a confirmed failure in the eyes of the world.

I try to write 1,000 words a day - about three pages. When I reach 1,000 words I feel good. Less than that: a failure. More than that: tired.