Quotes About Writing

The great thing about writing jokes for President Obama is that he is not afraid to tell jokes that are actually funny - and not just funny for a politician.

I write about presidents. That means I write about guys - so far. I'm interested in the people closest to them, the people they love and the people they've lost... I don't want to limit it to what they did in the office, but what happens at home and in their interactions with other people.

While I love to read contemporary fiction, I'm not drawn to writing it. Perhaps it's because the former journalist in me is too inhibited by the press of reality; when I think about writing of my own time I always think about nonfiction narratives. Or perhaps it's just that I find the present too confounding.

I think people assumed because of my last name that I was a real right-winger. And if you cared to look at my writing, you would be hard pressed to deduce that I'm an ideological right-winger.

You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.

I write because writing is something that I have to do. And it doesn't matter whether people like it or not. When I write, I feel the pressure and anxiety that come with taking an empty piece of paper and trying to fill it with something from your own consciousness.

There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful.

I had a year of panic attacks. I was feeling really pressured, like I could never do it again. With a first novel, you put things on hold because it takes so much mental energy and self-belief to keep on writing.

Everyone has his own sound. I'm not going to presume how to tell anybody how to write.

The old injunction 'Don't talk with your mouth full' is based on the presumption that, however multifunctional a mouth may be, it should only perform one job at a time. Humans have found a way around this limitation in the form of food writing.

It feels presumptuous to think of writing for adults.

I do not pretend to write much of a letter. You know under what circumstances I am writing.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.

Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

The thing I hate the most in any kind of writing is self-righteousness. Where you pretend you don't have the same kinds of flaws your subject has.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I had no real idea I was going to become a writer. It was just a game for me. I just liked pretending, daydreaming and imagining.

When you're a business man, you have a lot of businesses, a lot of times they think you're laundering money or you're pretending you're writing things off that you don't.

The best thing to do when you're writing is to write about something you know instead of pretending. I mean, you can do that too, obviously, but when you write from your heart, it works so much better.

It sounds pretentious to say I 'divide' my time, but when I am home, that usually means my house in Atlanta or my cabin in the North Georgia Mountains. The latter is where I do the majority of my writing.

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

Honestly, I don't focus on what my writing is called. I don't mean to sound artsy and pretentious, I just really can't think of things in that way. For me, the point is telling a story that keeps people up past bedtime, while hopefully exploring ideas that resonate.