Quotes About Writing

I'm not a disciplined writer.

I am a disciplined person. When I am writing, I write for 7-8 hours.

I think I'm less disciplined than a lot of other people, I'm afraid, but on the other hand, I've written a lot of books.

Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.

Writing about feeling disconnected has enabled me to connect, and that has been the most lovely thing of all.

That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.

I don't set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it's about.

I write linearly without knowing the full story. I discover it as I write it.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

I think all literature should be read as comparative literature. And I think we should write out of what we know, but in the expectation that we can be changed at any moment by something we have yet to discover.

One day, I discovered that a couple of people had written 'fanfic' - stories of their own based on my characters. Just the thought of people thinking that hard and deeply about something I've written is incredible.

While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.

In a way, 'Billy Elliot' was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.

I've always known what I'm meant to do. The path of my life has been about discovering what I need to do to support myself as a writer.

Very often I'll find out at the end of a book what I put in at the beginning. A sort of process of elimination and discovery in one.

So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.

It's so funny because a lot of times we'll have these discussions as writers, and you feel like you're having a discussion with your wife: 'I don't know. Are they ready to have another baby? Is it time? Well, she's not getting any younger.'

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.

It is so common to write autobiographical fiction in which your own experience is thinly disguised.

I think it helped that 'Fleabag' had such a dramatic arc to it, even though it was disguised as a comedy.

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.