Quotes About Writing

Writing a book is not as tough as it is to haul thirty-five people around the country and sweat like a horse five nights a week.

Some people are tied to five hundred words a day, six days a week. I'm a hesitater.

I start work at 7 A.M. and write all day, seven days a week. If I don't write, I can't sleep.

I tend to write during the day so I can see my children at night. But if my kids aren't with me and I have a chunk of time when I'm a single woman living in my house for a miraculous week, I will get to write at different hours.

I'm not a believer that you have to write every day. If I felt industrious, I'd spend ten hours a week writing. The writing is going on all the time in my head; the trick is to capture it. Showers are great. Traffic jams are great.

It's a job. When I'm writing I'm going to do it five to six days a week and I'm going to work for four to six hours a day. There's no magic writing fairy. It's just hard work.

I once set myself a deadline: half a chapter a week, 20 minutes a day. The thought froze me instantly, like literary Botox. I returned to my non-schedule: sleeping, writing 20 minutes, and then back to sleep. Breakfast in bed, with juice congealing on the sill: pages and pages began to pour out again.

I write about six to seven hours a day, five days a week, unless I'm traveling.

People say sometimes, gosh, that was brave of you to write such-and-such last week. 'Brave?' What do they mean 'brave?' It's right! How could you not write it?

On Saturdays, I get up early, spread out my notes from the week on the kitchen table, and create stories from them.

I'd been acting since I was a teenager. I'd come to the point where I was writing my own movies of the week for TV. That was fun.

When I was bringing up a child, I taught myself to write in very short, concentrated bursts. If I had a weekend, or a week, I'd do unbelievable amounts of work.

The hardest part about writing fiction is finding long stretches of time to do it: for me, this means writing mostly on Saturdays and Sundays. But I am always thinking about my characters, jotting down ideas in stolen moments and hoping I'll be able to make sense of them when the weekend rolls around.

Until now, I've been a kind of binge-writer - I'll carve out five or six hours on a weekend day and make a large container of espresso and just bang out a lot of words.

I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.

I begin early in the morning and edit everything I wrote the previous day. I write until mid-afternoon. My goal is to write a chapter per week, and if I am not finished by Friday, I write on the weekend. I get a lot of fan emails and answer them every day. In the late afternoon, I attend to the business of publishing, etc.

Some of our best episodes of 'Buffy' were written over a weekend. You can really get in touch with your creative spirit when you're at your most desperate.

I was writing blogs before work, then I was writing at work, and then I started writing books on the weekend because you just have that sort of energy in your 20s; it's wonderful.

I've written tons of scripts, and when I wrote 'The New Girl in Town,' I read it to my parents, and they suggested I make a movie out of it. I got a few friends together, and I shot the movie in one weekend, and then my mom and I edited it.

Each week, we might write 500 jokes for 'Weekend Update,' and ultimately, we can only do about 10.

So when 'Skatetown' came up at Columbia and Ray Stark's studio, the idea was to do it quick. They wanted it out in the fall, and they gave me the treatment on July 4th weekend! I wrote it in four days, and, you know, it kind of looks like it.

People do sometimes ask me some really idiotic questions: 'Is your husband afraid of you putting arsenic in his food?' I replied that I have never written a book about poison, ever.

It's always fun to write the little bit of TV that the characters watch in 'Gravity Falls,' because it's a perfect place to poke fun at the media.

Writing about poker is one of my passions.