Quotes About Writing

Spelling is a pain in the neck. I do my best with it, but I figger if a guy has tremendous gifts as a writer, his audience will forgive a few slip-ups in the spelling department.

A book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to preserve it. The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or beautifully helpful

To be taught to write or to speak — but what is the use of speaking if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think — nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.

For certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader will certainly misunderstand them.

To everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you've already clreated the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.

My characters were...rebelling against something...My own bad writing. I wouldn't do for my characters what they needed for me to do - be courageous enough in my writing to make them interesting.

KPS is not, and I say this with absolutely no slight intended, a brooding symphony of a novel. It's a pop song. It's meant to be light and catchy, with three minutes of hooks and choruses for you to sing along with, and then you're done and you go on with your day, hopefully with a smile on your face. I had fun writing this, and I needed to have fun writing this. We all need a pop song from time to time, particularly after a stretch of darkness.

We've already established whoever is writing us is an asshole. This sounds like just the sort of thing an asshole writer would do.

First off, to everyone who thinks writing a sequel should be easy because you've already created the universe: Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. No.

What is competent writing? Competent writing is writing that efficiently describes ideas and concepts to an audience, using a grammar that the audience can understand.

Ultimately, people write to be understood (excepting Gertrude Stein and Tristan Tzara, who were intentionally being difficult).

And before that, there was, oh, I don't know, editors experiencing demonic possessions and devouring lagging midlist writers. It's always something.

Years working at a newspaper. You learn to write fast and reasonably good and in a manner which does not require substantial editing. Or your editors and copyeditors stab you to death and hang your corpse in the newsroom as a warning to the other staff writers.

But my writing won't ever reflect the diversity that literature in general should be capable of. You need writers whose lives are not like mine for that.

Or, to put it more succinctly: Writing professionally is a business. If you want to write professionally, you have to approach writing in a professional manner—which is to say, you have to approach it with the intent of actually making money doing it. This means: One: It takes work. Lots and lots and lots of work. Two: Sometimes, work sucks. Three: But you do it anyway because that's your job. The previous three rules, incidentally, work

With sentences, shorter is better than longer:

the assumption that simple = stupid. But it's not true; indeed, I find from personal experience that the stupidest writers are the ones whose writing is positively baroque in form.

Be that as it may, if Stephen King or John Grisham really wanted to (and to be clear, I don't suspect they do), they could probably whip up a book comprised entirely of reviews of their own intestinal emanations ("A Bear in the Woods: 25 Years of Squatlogging, 1979-2004")

Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished you are always surprised. - John Steinbeck from the Fall 1975 issue of The Paris Review

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself.

I nearly always write just as I nearly always breathe.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to catch whole for they will break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book-to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.