Quotes About Writing

I can really write what I want. I can take time; I can do nothing for a year. That is paradise.

You have to be good. And keep getting better. For every writer taken on, another is dropped. A paradox: you have to rise to stay level.

All this talk about writing is a little bit moot, because it is almost an unthinking process. It is actually a paradox because you are constantly making choices.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.

I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.

Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.

As I sat in a small room constructing what seemed to me awkward sentences and paragraphs, McCone was out having exciting adventures.

I even dream about writing. I'm talking seeing words across the page, whole paragraphs.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

I was in Siena and decided I wanted to write a story set there. Then I discovered that the original story of Romeo and Juliet was set in Siena. It occurred to me that this was too much of a gift - I had to do it. That's how I ended up writing a parallel story to Romeo and Juliet.

I'm excited about the idea of an act of theatre triggering a parallel creative act of writing.

It's not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, 'Read,' but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, 'Don't read, don't think, just write,' and the result could be a mountain of drivel.

I'm really just trying... to write what feels true to me. I don't think about a lofty responsibility. I think I'd be paralyzed by that. Like any of my male colleagues, I'm writing the stories that interest me in a way that feels true to me.

I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional... but just a little.

There's a lot of progress happening in TV. You have amazing shows like 'How to Get Away With Murder.' You have people like Shonda Rhimes, Lee Daniels with 'Empire,' and Jason Katims with 'Friday Night Lights' and 'Parenthood.' You have people behind the scenes writing complex women.

The writing became a hobby in the background: it took a back seat to parenthood and being a person and being a human being.

I set out to write an anti-parenting parenting book.

I think that being a parent has expanded my writing, expanded my understanding of my characters, and has added a depth and richness to my work. Having kids deepened my idea of parenting and all the anxieties that come along with it.

I don't want to believe it - that parenting itself makes art hard, that you must always sacrifice one for the other, that there is something inherently selfish and greedy and darkly obsessive in the desire to care as much about the thing you are writing or making as you do about the other humans in your life. What parent would want to believe this?

The influence of Paris, for instance, is now minimal. Yet a lot is written about Paris fashion.