Quotes About Writing

Most of the time I write visually. I get a visual of me in the audience watching the concert. I usually come up with the hooks first. Like with 'Old School.'

The key thing if you're a writer is to visualize the scene and convey it to the penciller and turn the penciller loose.

Everything about video games has changed. The writing, the acting, the visuals, obviously - everything has gone to a new level. And the difference that I see as an actor is that I don't have to push that extra bit to sell what's going on.

For me, when I started writing, it was mostly poetry. And poetry is very visual. I feel the same way about the way that I approach direction. There might be a theme within the visuals that you're choosing that people don't consciously pick up on, but that they feel.

What a thrill it is to have my writing recognized by an institution as admirable and vital as the National Endowment for the Arts.

Not only is writing more important than ever, but visual literacy is vital. We don't teach enough design, art, visual things. We have to recognize what we're seeing. It matters if you send someone a cluttered design. It matters more than ever.

This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home.

Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach.

From my years of teaching creative writing, I know that new writers take the setting for granted, as simply a place to set the action, but setting is a vital element in fiction writing and deserves serious treatment.

Writers like John T. Edge, whose work is all about the cultural histories behind food, have done so much to show that these stories are a really vital part of our cultural heritage.

When I'm not writing, I feel an awareness that something's missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There's something vital that's not happening.

When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss.

Writing is, of course, a solitary occupation. But for many writers, myself included, it's through writing that we make certain vital connections.

Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry.

I've always been fascinated by dreams - mine are so vivid. I went through a period in my 20s when I wrote down my dreams every morning. Then life intervened, and I stopped doing it.

'Olive Kitteridge' is a masterpiece: The writing is so perfect you don't even notice it; the story is so vivid it's less like reading a story than experiencing it firsthand.

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

When I think of Emily Dickinson, there's not one particular poem of hers that jumps out, but I do have a very vivid image of an ill woman with giant eyes who wants to write about the sun exploding.

Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.

I just always felt whole when I was writing. I felt this kind of beautiful privacy that I never felt in any other way. I feel like there's this great fullness to being alone, and writing is a really vivid way and a really magical way of being alone.

I was writing short stories aged seven or eight. I had a vivid, overactive imagination.

One of my goals is to allow readers to see my characters and the world they inhabit as vividly as possible.

When a place comes across vividly in a novel, it's often compared to a character. I can remember writing teachers who encouraged me to treat setting as if it were a character, to give it three dimensions, to make it come alive, jump off the page.

I vividly remember being 14. That was the age when I started to get happy: I started being a writer and stopped being a loser.