Quotes About Writing

Of course I want to be a best seller because I'm in the business and I want to be read, but there is no money in the world that can compensate for writing badly.

You can't go wrong with major life and death stories when it comes to a competition, so I thought I'd have a go at writing one.

I found the writing arena to be much less competitive.

A writer can't afford to just focus on writing and leave marketing aside in today's competitive market.

I love it when I start a book that is so good that all I want to do is get back to my own writing, in a competitive way.

I always sympathize with people who complain about the length of my books. It would take me a year to get through one of them.

I like films to be complete in their written form.

It's not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.

It's a real challenge to complete a story arc and end up with a cool punchline in 120 characters.

I haven't read for pleasure in 35 years. I mean, I get a lot of pleasure from what I read... For me, it's gotten so that it doesn't seem as though I've read a book unless I've written about it. It really seems the completion of the reading process.

Blogs are the main exception I make in my aversion to complex machinery.

A lot of people ask me, 'Are you born a writer?' And I don't think it's necessarily true. I just think what you either have or you don't is this ability to see something that's complex and worth talking about.

In my experience, when you're writing, you want the truth, and you don't want to be apologetic in any way. But there is something in writing, the complexity of it, that works against that aim.

Working on 'Mad Men' was an incredible experience. It was such an incredible show with beautiful writing and so much complexity.

Somehow, the whole idea of me writing art reviews was just too much of a complicated thought, but I liked art, and later on I just realized that it would be perhaps a pleasure, and so I decided to do it for 'Art in America' - a lot.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.

As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.

I keep a composition book with me at all times to write rhymes, to write down ideas, write down my thoughts, you know just so I don't forget any ideas.

I got a job as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years, but I found writing incredibly difficult, and I thought, 'How am I going to make a film if I can't write?' I didn't really comprehend that someone else would do that bit.

I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position.

What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.

Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing.

My identity is based around being a writer. I can't not write. It's a compulsion.