Quotes About Writing

You need three things to become a successful novelist: talent, luck and discipline. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.

You know what I did after I wrote my first novel? I shut up and wrote twenty-three more." ( "The Castle" )

I don't have any regrets, really, except that one. I wanted to write about you, about us, really. Do you know what I mean? I wanted to write about everything, the life we're having and the lives we might have had. I wanted to write about all the ways we might have died.

T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in.

The note was brief—three paragraphs, two hundred and seventy-three words, the lines crowded together as if for warmth.

Ockham snorted. "I am no nominalist. The problem with teaching the Modern Way is that lesser scholars, excited by the novelty, seldom bother to master my insights. There are lips on which I heartily wish my name had never rested. I tell you, Dietl, a man becomes a heretic less for what he writes than for what others believe he has written.

?nsanlar?n kötülükleri ya?ar tunçta, yazar?z erdemlerini suya." - Shakespeare

If you spend long enough realizing a character in your book, congratulations, you've made a friend for life.

I'm just letting you know that these stories I'm writing are not going to be about a superhero TV kind of dog. Our dog Mister Mosely. And they will all be true. Even the ones that I wish weren't.

script as fast, easy, and enjoyable to read as possible.

Screenplays for most Hollywood movies are now available online (usually at no cost, at sites like scriptstork.com, script-o-rama.com, simplyscripts.com, scriptcity.com, and dailyscript.com) or in printed or published form (at thewritersstore.com and sites such as scriptshack.com and scriptcity.com).

Explicit statements are those that are clearly defined in writing.

I'm a dad, I'm a husband, I'm an activist, I'm a writer and I'm just a student of the world.

Writing is a lot like sex: at first you do it because you enjoy it. Then you find yourself doing it with others. But if you're any good at all, you end up doing it for less money than it's worth.

I don't like to write. But I love having written.

I don't like to write, but I love to have written.

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched, because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.

The public has no idea that writing is a disease, and that the writer who publishes is like a beggar who exhibits his sores.

Today, however, we know that writing, at least science writing, is partly a skill. And skills can be improved. The pain can be reduced.

When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few if any of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.

I was a nerd in high school. Still am. That is why I had to write I KISSED A GHOUL ... because it is about a nerd in high school. It is my first Young Adult book too. Hope you enjoy it...

The reason I write about vampires is this: you take a zombie, it just attacks it prey. Vampires use seduction ....

My first sale was of a record review of Pink Floyd's The Final Cut that was in 1983. My first national sale was with science fiction writer Frederik Pohl for the magazine Starlog in 1993. My first book was published in 2003, Giants of the Genre (Wildside Press)