Quotes About Writing

I assume as a writer that most of the time I'm going to fall down and fail.

I do play the guitar, but I do it for fun. And I am terrible at writing music as well. I have tried and failed, horribly.

Whenever I have tried to write for other people, that's when my writing has failed, when nobody wanted to read it or buy it. But it's only when I've been able to write a story that makes me excited, only then have other people wanted to read it.

I never failed at anything in fiction.

One of the ways my first novel failed was that I was too in love with my characters.

As writers, we all have an agenda, but if you recognize that agenda in a book, then you've failed.

If you write about a process you're about to go through, market research, and you go through it, and it doesn't echo what you've written about, you've failed.

Anyone can write a detective story about a detective who fails, for Pete's sake. That's pretty unambitious.

My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative.

I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.

I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.

This means I must pay close attention to the writing, but equally so to the scientific background - which sometimes means doing fairly involved calculations.

I think my blog is fairly circumspect and elliptical. I've written personal essays, but they are short and to the point: in and out, and that's that.

I like to write in fairly everyday language - I've always tried to write lyrics that, if people would speak the words, it wouldn't sound like a song.

You can fake a lot of stuff, but you can't fake if the story isn't there and if the writing isn't good.

A lot of the time, I read something I've written, and I think, 'Well, that's competent. It's not exactly breaking any boundaries. It's not exactly transgressive. It's just a bunch of fake people in a room talking to each other. But maybe there's a value to that.'

I often have trouble falling asleep at night, so when I'm lying in bed I think up stories. That's where I do a lot of my thinking. I also get a lot of ideas while I'm reading - sometimes reading someone else's stories will make me think of one of my own.

The writing that I have found to be most false is the writing that doesn't offer hope.

The thing I hate about writers is they want to state their case and they use false information.

I don't write for fame or money, I simply want to share my experiences.

I think, when you're doing a column and blogging every day, you get familiar with the sound of your own voice.

A lot of school-going children are familiar with my writing. I am basically very much a children books author.

Everything I write doesn't appear to be biography until later. I often say that I've never written about anything I've experienced. Of course, that's not true. But it doesn't appear familiar to me at all. And maybe that's because I have to be in a kind of coma in order to write. If it appeared familiar, I wouldn't.