Quotes About Writing

I work best without distractions. Do Not Disturb signs are made for someone like me. I'm baffled by writers who prefer to write in Starbucks.

I'm an into-the-mist writer in terms of plotting, and my process in general is very intuitive. Since my series characters are well established, what usually happens is they start talking in my head, and I'd better grab a pad and pen or hit the digital recorder feature on my iPhone or get to the keyboard before it goes away.

When I finished the first draft of Death Will Get You Sober, I joined Sisters in Crime and, later, Mystery Writers of America. After that, it was a matter of doing a lot of revision, sending out hundreds of queries over several years, and applying "talent, persistence, and luck"--sometimes known as "persistence, persistence, persistence."

I spent fifteen years working for various publishers editing text and reference books, including a beautifully edited but mind-numbing accounting textbook. That didn't get me any closer to being a published novelist, though it made me a crackerjack editor.

I first said I wanted to be a writer at the age of seven. It took longer to get that first novel out than I expected.

My first novel, Death Will Get You Sober, came out on my sixty-fourth birthday--not quite the career path I expected.

I get lots of ideas when the lights go out at night and it gets very quiet. Sometimes they come when I first lie down to sleep; other times I wake up with an idea racing through my mind. But regardless of when an idea comes, I have made it a habit to get out of bed and write the idea down before it disappears into my dreams. You should do the same.

I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing -- I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project -- it's an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.

For Andy, who encouraged me to write in the first place. See, this is all your fault . . .

Aesthetics, he said, should be left to the so-called artists, to the writers and readers of fiction. There is no need to fret about writing, about our choice of words in the New South Africa; rather, we will have to make do with mixtures of meaning, will have to rely on typographic devices like the slash for many more years, he predicted.

A butler supplies food to nourish your body, but a writer nourishes your mind through writing.

A good writer is a magician; she unfolds the dark secrets of the mind.

A writer should never wait for inspiration but be the inspiration.

A writer travels through the heart again and again to express the beauty of its contents.

Always write to change society for the better. You will go, but it will live as a treasure forever.

Always write to change society for the better. You will go, but it will live forever as a treasure.

Drink the ecstasy of life and write about it.

Let your heart dance with pen and paper. Now fill the paper with dancing letters.

You are not responsible for the reader, you're only responsible for what you are writing.

You're writing every moment in your mind but not putting it down on paper. Write your thoughts; it will be beautiful.

You never know when a typical life will be anything but, and you won't know if you are rewriting history, or rewriting the future, until the writing is complete.

There is no perfect solution to the problem of writing about therapy patients. But not to do so strikes me as the riskiest choice at a time in our culture when the power to define madness, malingering, and suicide potential is being handed over to insurance company functionaries.

As horrific as the Holocaust was, it is firmly in the past. When I write about it, I am writing about what was. Though I remain horrified by what happened, it is history. Contemporary antisemitism is not. It is about the present. It is what many people are doing, saying, and facing now.

When you start writing, your incredulity at the childish, incompetent, graceless thing you've done is shattering. One of the advantages of having experience as a writer - and there aren't many, in face I can't think of any other - is that you know you can make the horrible thing better, then you can make it better again, then you can make it better again. And you may not be able to make it good, but at least it's not going to be what you're looking at now.