Quotes About Writing

When you're a kid and your father is an engineer, he goes to the office. I saw my father get up and go to the office in the house and write. But I don't see any similarities.

My father was a screenwriter, but he was also a novelist.

It's a little bit in the genes because my brother is a journalist and my father was a sports writer.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

It's not the fear of writing that blocks people, it's fear of not writing well; something quite different.

Even when I have to write a simple letter I'm scared stiff as if faced with looming seasickness.

It was written without fear and without research.

It was only as I wrote about fear that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.

I had an old typewriter and a big idea.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one.

I have also written a book about the Giving of the Torah, and a book on the Days of Awe, and a book on the books of Israel that have been written since the day the Torah was given to Israel.

I just write when fear overtakes me.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.

The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

I tend to scare myself.

I find writing very difficult. It's hard and it hurts sometimes, and it's scary because of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the limit of your abilities.

Either I did away with that fear through writing, or in the course of writing, I discovered it was no longer so intrusive or threating. The bottom line is, it's gone.

I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing.

An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

For me, just showing up for the traveling and writing gave me the power to overcome my fear of fear.

I don't write out of fear. I write out of a strong urge to meet death on its own eternal terms, because the fact is that if you write as little as a page of prose-even bad prose-that is eternal.

All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.