Quotes About Writing

I remember a distinct moment when it was my junior year of college, and the content I was making was changing and not really myself, and I tried to switch back to just putting me out there. I'm happy that happened really early in my career, because that was before I started doing podcasts or writing.

In any good piece of writing, it should be easy enough to switch genders.

The pen is mightier than the sword, and is considerably easier to write with.

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword.

'Ancillary Sword' picked up the Locus and the BSFA, which surprised the heck out of me.

Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones.

As a writer, I can't be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who's been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back.

I try to write conversationally; I try to write like people speak and put the emphasis on the right syllable.

In my opinion, it is easier to avoid iambic rhythms, when writing in syllabics, if you create a line or pattern of lines using odd numbers of syllables.

Everything I write is meant to share what I'm struggling with. I hope that it helps other people. I benefit from that a great deal because I always hear new ideas from my readers. It's a very symbiotic relationship.

And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.

I like straightforward names for my characters. When I get too symbolic with names or places, I start feeling like the characters and the story are less read, and I lose interest.

Accident is as much a part of fiction as anything else, symbolic of the grace that, along with will, conspires to put words on the page.

Playing with different genres and perspectives and ways of telling stories is one of the perks of being a novelist, but at the same time, I want precision. And in order to be precise about stuff, you have to get personal. Symbolism is very boring.

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time. Poets were still poor, had little sponsored work, and could not depend on a sympathetic reaction to their poetry. But the idea of the poet was honored.

I always loved Flannery O'Conner, and how she's not trying to create sympathetic characters.

Something that's seldom appreciated about me is that I am in sympathy with a great deal of what Marx wrote, except that I'm on the side of the bourgeoisie.

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

I tend to write short, brief snippets - I lean toward the chamber music end as opposed to the symphony end of things.

I learned all about big band arrangement and symphony arrangement and writing for strings.

It would be easy to assume that the open letter is a symptom of the Internet age. Such is not the case. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin wrote an open letter to the prime minister of Great Britain, Lord North - a satirical call for the imposition of martial law in the colonies.

I believe that writer's block is a symptom. It's not a disease, it's the symptom of a disease. So what I try to do is kind of do it like 'House'; write down the symptom and write down the other symptoms. Try to work backwards to figure out what the problem is.

The first writing I did was short short stories for a newspaper syndicate for which I was paid five dollars a piece on publication.

I used to write a monthly column for the 'New York Times' syndicate. But I stopped because I found it really hard to have one extreme opinion a month. I don't know how these columnists have two or three ideas a week; I was having difficulty having 12 things to say a year.