Quotes About Writing

Writing is a method for storing information through material signs.

It didn't disturb the Sumerians that their script was ill-suited for writing poetry. They didn't invent it in order to copy spoken language, but rather to do things that spoken language failed at.

Writing and money made it possible to start collecting taxes from hundreds of thousands of people, to organise complex bureaucracies and to establish vast kingdoms.

Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master.

Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools. This ecological tragedy was restaged

La escritura nació como la criada de la conciencia humana, pero cada vez más se está convirtiendo en su dueña y señora.

El lenguaje escrito pudo haberse concebido como un medio modesto para describir la realidad, pero gradualmente se convirtió en un medio poderoso para remodelarla.

sistema de procesamiento de datos que los sumerios inventaron se llama «escritura».

To write past events in the present tense adds immediacy to your prose. ~Yvonne Blackwood

For me writing is light, a radiance that captures everything in a fine profile. This light searches and illuminates, it is a safe place from which to uncover the emotional havoc of our experience. Light is a bright warmth which heals. Writing can be this kind of light.

It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.

It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.

I knew when I was writing The Angel's Game that a lot of people would be upset that I didn't write Shadow Of The Wind 2. That's okay, that's part of the game. You do what you have to do. If they like it, great. If they don't, too bad. What are you going to do?

I am a night creature, and I write from midnight till dawn, secluded in my office and surrounded by my collection of dragons (I have 400 of them). I only use Macintosh computers, which I name in dynastic order. Right now I'm using MacDragon 5. Only the devil is able to decipher my handwriting.

I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

Sunt înc?rcat cu amintiri ca un m?r, în toamn?. Scutura?i pomul ?i, dac? nu cad destule fructe, da?i cu pietre în el, sau, ?i mai bine, lovi?i-i fiecare creang? cu pr?jina. Pentru mine, amintirile sunt o grea povar?. Iau de pe inima mea o parte din aceast? povar? cu fiecare carte pe care o scriu.

My favorite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a throw-away scene.

If I get enough letters saying you never explained this or that, I suppose I'll have to write another book.

After a while the business end of writing takes too much of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end. Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more money than the ten percent.

I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.

I have two careers that I can do at home in my jammies--the other is online therapy, treating clients around the world via chat and email--so I spend most days at the computer whether I'm writing or not.

Remember that in today's market, distribution and promotion are as important as craft. But don't forget what made you want to write fiction. If it was for the money, you're in the wrong business!

I fell in love with the short story form and kept on going. I found that even 3,000 words is surprisingly spacious and that writing short allowed me to experimented with different subgenres and voices without a huge investment of time and energy or too much of a stake in the outcome for any particular story.

My goal as a writer is to move people, to make them laugh and cry, and I'm gratified when I succeed. But I didn't invent the humor in recovery. It's already there. There's a tremendous amount of laughter at a good AA meeting.