Quotes About Writing

It's hard to land a devastating jab/cross/hook/uppercut combo to your reader's imagination when you're telegraphing your punches.

Writing fiction is an act of imagination and fantasizing, and it's not relating in prose what you've been doing for the last two or three years.

Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.

I heard that Stephen King doesn't sleep well, ... so I gues that he doesn't sleep well from his imagination. If I had the same imagination I won't sleep too!

The reality I submerse myself in when writing, is far greater than the physical reality surrounding me at work!

In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.

A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.

If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research.

When I'm not at the keyboard, I'm generally reading, practicing tai chi or middle eastern dance, or cooking.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Tears are words that need to be written.

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.

When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.

I don't think writers should write about answers. I think writers should write about questions.

It's easier to revise lousy writing than to revise a blank sheet of paper.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.

Anyone who writes is too precious to lose.

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination.

The best place to solve a problem is on paper.

Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening.