Quotes About Writing

But there is supposed to be sex in this book, isn't there? I suppose I could write a chapter without having anybody do anything to anybody, just talking and thinking, but it seems a bad idea for the very first chapter of the book. The reader might get discouraged. It seems, oh, very egoish to feel that total strangers will be that interested in what one says or thinks, but everybody

The book was How to Write a Novel, by Manuel Komroff; a professor at Columbia University, he was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction. His book, published in 1950, is available from used booksellers for between $10 and $25.

type my work and get it copied before delivering the original to my agent. (Not too many years before that I'd have made a carbon copy. Do you remember carbon paper? Does anybody?)

Perhaps I've just mounted the initial stamp on a page that used to be blank. Perhaps I've filled the final space on that page. Or, as is more often the case, perhaps I've added a fifteenth stamp to a page, thus reducing its number of blank spaces from nineteen to eighteen. In any event, I'm looking at progress—and I take a moment to enjoy it.

Some months after that, Markham was published, subtitle and all, and the first I knew of it was when I got a phone call late one night from a writer friend of mine named Randall P. Garrett. Now Randy lived substantially less than a mile from us, around 110th Street and Broadway, and when he wasn't home working he was around the corner in a neighborhood

The book probably owes a little to The Tooth and the Nail, by Bill S. Ballinger, a fine writer who's pretty much forgotten these

When Terry Zobeck was working away at my bibliography, A Trawl Among the Shelves, I kept recalling books and stories and articles of mine that had slipped my mind, and reporting what I could recall; Terry, apparently indefatigable, would scour the internet until he came up with a copy of the new discovery, add it to his collection, and write it up for the bibliography.

wrote it in the summer of 1959 in my furnished room at the Hotel Rio, on West Forty-Seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues.

Thanks! Lawrence Block Ebook Design: JW Manus

thought of writing a lesbian novel. I read a great deal of lesbian fiction and nonfiction, some by Marijane Meaker under one name or another. I'm sure I read them in part out of prurient interest, but that's why I initially read John O'Hara, James T. Farrell, and no end of fine writers.

not Small Town turns out to be what New Yorkers want to read, it is very definitely the book this New Yorker needed to write. It is, I came to realize, a post-apocalyptic novel set in New York in the summer of 2002. We've had our apocalypse, and we're New Yorkers, and we're moving on.

With all its imperfections lying heavy on its head, I can't help being attached to it because in the writing of it I first heard the sound of my own voice, lame and halting perhaps, but nevertheless my very own. This is an experience no artist ever forgets —the birth cry of a newly born baby of letters, the genuine article.

Esos momentos son los que colman al escritor, no al enamorado, y perduran para siempre. Podemos evocarlos cuantas veces queramos o utilizarlos como fundamento para construir esa parte de la vida que es la tarea de escribir.

Bir kad?nla üç ÅŸey yapabilirsin; ya onu seversin ya onun için ac? çekersin ya da onu yazars?n.

In the great quietness of these winter evenings there is one clock: the sea. Its dim momentum in the mind is the fugue upon which this writing is made. Empty cadences of sea-water licking its own wounds, sulking along the mouths of the delta, boiling upon those deserted beaches– empty, forever empty under the gulls: white scribble on the grey, munched by clouds.

These are the moments which possess the writer, not the lover, and which live on perpetually. One can return to them time and time again in memory, or use them as a fund upon which to build the part of one's life which is writing. One can debauch them with words, but one cannot spoil them.

The sad part about happy endings is there's nothing to write about.

May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.

And the sad truth is that nobody wants me to write comedy. The Exorcist not only ended that career, it expunged all memory of its existence.

If you kill a character people feel sad. That's too easy.

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

I was always depressed growing up. There wasnt a reason for it, I just was. I was sad and morose. I cried a lot, I wrote a lot, and I read a lot; and that was how I dealt with it.

Being a writer means crying over the sad parts, even though you already know it's going to be okay.

You sound so miserable.""All novelists are.