Quotes About Writing

No matter how difficult the subject, while writing, a poet is unchained from sadness, and free —Jane Hirshfield

I love my life as a writer and mapmaker of family relationships.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself. —Truman Capote When

I learn my lines while on the golf course. I try to do two or three things at once. I have ideas for books all the time, I have ideas for paintings all the time, and I write them all down. I take my sketchpad and my iPad, which I design on, and I do sit down and do specific tasks at specific times.

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It's perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist.

Good writers are like magpies, attracted to shiny things and storing away treasures - pieces of dialogue and experience - which pop up from memory unexpectedly.

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

To help pass the time, William set to work writing. He called the first tract he wrote in Newgate Prison The Great Case for Liberty of Conscience. In the tract he argued that a person could be free only if he or she had choices to make, and when those choices were made for a person by someone over him or her, everyone loses out. People must be allowed to test the truth of their beliefs for themselves and see if that was what they really believed or merely what they had been made to believe.

I found I could not not let the words flow.

Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.

The mystique and the false glamour of the writing profession grow partly out of a mistaken belief that people who can express profound ideas and emotions have ideas and emotions more profound than the rest of us. It isn't so. The ability to express is a special gift with a special craft to support it and is spread fairly equally among the profound, the shallow, and the mediocre.

Since I can barely write two books a year the best solution seems to be co-author projects. My goal isn't to get another writer to clone me... it's more to produce a book that shares my vision of positive, fun entertainment.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

The Olwyn force wins only when the writer bows to its power and puts down his pen.

The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their characters assume in the books written about them.

As you no doubt gathered, I do not devote the care to word selection and organization in my letters that I do in my books Generally, I don't write letters at all...Writing, for me, is work, and I do not like to do my work carelessly, but if I waited until I got a letter into the shape I'd be happy with, you would never hear another word from me and would think I had perished on a mountain...

Old writers never die, they just decom-prose!

Perhaps I wasn't going crazy after all. Perhaps I was just becoming a writer.

It's easy to write upcoming scenes in books and television shows. Trusting God to write them in real life is a lot harder. But it's worth it. And you have to admit, it's an adventure.

I want to gather up all the ink cartridges in the universe, because somewhere, mixed in with all that ink, is the next great American novel. And I'd love nothing more than to drink it.