Quotes About Writing

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power.

The fact that companies are getting into building power plants that collect their own CO2 on-site shows there's some leadership in that industry. Some industries have seen the writing on the wall: that carbon will have to be managed.

When you're working on a novel, you never think about how much it would cost to shoot one of your scenes. But that's a huge consideration in film and TV.

I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.

I never thought about doing a sequel when I was actually writing 'The Magicians.' I only ever considered it a standalone.

I've been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

Blogging requires consistency, and you need to have some time on your hands, which I don't really have.

Isn't that what writing is about? The constant attempt to understand the world?

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

I write constantly about everything.

When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

People don't think I can construct a sentence, let alone write a script.

Writing a script consumes so much of time.

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

When you sit down to write a film, you direct it in your head. If you are writing a scene, you are watching the scene. And maybe it's different when you are writing a novel because you are thinking of it in terms of being read. But films are only consumed one way - through the eyes and the ears.

When I'm not working in a professional capacity, I'm writing, and when I'm at home, it's a way of having contact with people or communicating.

I spend my life writing fiction, so reading fiction isn't much of an escape. That's not always true, but I don't read much contemporary fiction.

I like contemporary, bare-boned writing. I don't like having the language that I barely understand get in the way of me interpreting it over to an audience. It's this barrier that I don't want to have to attack.

With any period piece I think the thing to do is forget that it's not contemporary when you're writing and to have the characters feel as much as possible like characters that you would know.

I started writing songs for youth theater and stuff, and so it's really writing music for the stage that started me out, but then I eventually went to music college and did a two-year course in contemporary music and then just played in endless bands, cover bands, jazz bands.

Science fiction was one of those places, particularly during the McCarthy era, where you could write whatever you wanted because it was beneath contempt. They didn't bother censoring it.

As a writer, I can't really take days off. Writing is like creating an art. Once you stop writing, you can lose your rhythm and context, meaning that your writing may lose its power.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

Sometimes people ask, 'Does writing make you happy?' But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled.