Quotes About Writing

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

I'm very confident that Nick Hornby always gets it right as a writer. He has the vernacular and passion. He is adroit and dry, and balances humor with the humanity of life.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

I've just finished my book, I wrote it on penguins. Come to think of it, paper would have been better.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.

whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Improvisation is just writing in front of an audience.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

Writing humor in my column isn't as dangerous as performing it. If I fail in front of a live audience, the humiliation is as great as anything a human being can suffer.

How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?

I use a lot of humor in my writing. But it's completely black humor.

Writing humor is not something every single person can do.

It's not the tales of Stephen King that I've read, I need protection from the things in my head . . .

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people try their hand at this demanding profession (humor columnist). After a few months, almost all of them have given up and gone back to the ninth grade.

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

Writing a book is like sliding down a rainbow! Marketing it is like trudging through a field of chewed bubblegum on a hot, sticky day.