Quotes About Writing

I consider my work optimistic in that the people, during the period I'm writing about them, are experiencing intense emotion. It is my belief that this is all there is to it.

At the moment, sitting on the edge of the bed with his eleven pages in his hands, he recognized a great similarity between stealing and writing. Both were intensely private matters.

Ministers should be very wary that they do not bring forth fuel to feed the fears and doubts of weak Christians in their preaching and writing, for it is a great part of their work to arm weak Christians against their fears and weaknesses.

I no longer predicted a future with any of them, and it could have been, in fact, that I subconsciously chose women who were so fucked up, disaster was virtually assured, providing fodder for the stories I was now writing about Asian guys who dated fucked-up white girls.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

I never think at all when I write nobody can do two things at the same time and do them both well

My ignorance is essential. I do not write what I know but what I need to know.

Don't argue with people who write with digital ink and pay by the kilowatt-hour.

I get started at 5:30 in the morning and write till 10 A.M. Then I hike six or seven miles before going back to work.

You know, I mean this sincerely, you know, I'm so grateful that I get to get up in the morning and do this, you know, and write books.

He writes mostly about crime, although if he can talk Óscar into it he'll do "color" features

I look for a particular kind of sentence, perhaps more often the awkward than the beautiful. A broke-back sentence is interesting. Any sentence that begins with the phrase, It is not clear that... is clearly clumsy but preparing itself for greatness of a kind. A way of backing into a storyof getting past the readers hardwon armor.

I certainly dont write to exclude anyone.

Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful.

Fragments are the only forms I trust.

I majored in Creative Writing in college. Then I got over it.

Probably nobody ever jogs toward the room where they will write their suicide note

It was apparent...that, all over America, thousands of people threw down a book or got up from a television show and said, 'I can write better than that!' It was amazing how many of them were wrong.

But Blake's voices returned to dictate revisions.

In the eighties and nineties, a New England monthly named Yankee paid me $4,000 four times a year, each time for an essay of a thousand words. Playboy paid an enormous sum in 1975 for my essay "Fathers Playing Catch with Sons," and Reader's Digest reprinted it. In the new century, fees have considerably lessened. A few years ago, a diminished Playboy printed three new essays of mine, and the three stipends together amounted to less than 1975's single check.

If you are destined to become a writer, you can't help it. If you can help it, you aren't destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn't have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing.

McKee's a genius. And hillarious. You'll like him, too, Charles. He's all for originality, just like you. He says that we have to realize that we all write in a genre and we must find our originality within that genre. As it turns out, there hasn't been a new genre since Fellini invented the mockumentary. My genre's thriller, what's yours?

Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.