Quotes About Writing

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

The most enviable writers are those who, quite often unanalytically and unconsciously, have realized that there are different facets to their nature and are able to live and work with now one, now another, in the ascendant.

The best way to do this is to rise half an hour, or a full hour, earlier than you customarily rise. Just as soon as you can—and without talking, without reading the morning's paper, without picking up the book you laid aside the night before—begin to write. Write anything that comes into your head:

If you are unwilling to write from the honest, though perhaps far from the final, point of view that represents your present state, you may come to your deathbed with your contribution to the world still unmade, and just as far from final conviction about the universe as you were at the age of twenty.

It is well to understand as early as possible in one's writing life that there is just one contribution which every one of us can make: we can give into the common pool of experience some comprehension of the world as it looks to each of us

Most of the methods of training the conscious side of the writer-the craftsman and the critic in him- are actually hostile to the good of the artist's side; and the converse of this proposition is likewise true. But it is possible to train both sides of the character to work in harmony, and the first step in that education is to consider that you must teach yourself not as though you were one person, but two.

Write to your fear.

You can't say, I won't write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then... you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.

Knitting is very conducive to thought. It is nice to knit a while, put down the needles, write a while, then take up the sock again.

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

find it, I know you'll come back to me.' It's been 18 months since my husband was murdered and I've decided to finish writing The Flavours of Love, the cookbook he started before he died. Everyone thinks I'm coping so well without him –they have no idea what I've been hiding or what I do away from prying eyes. But now that my 14-year-old daughter has confessed something so devastating it could destroy our family

Dorothy Koomson is the author of seven other novels: The Cupid Effect, The Chocolate Run, My Best Friend's Girl, Marshmallows for Breakfast, The Ice Cream Girls and The Woman He Loved Before –all of which have spent several weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Her books have been translated into thirty languages and regularly top the bestseller charts around the

If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.

We can none of us say why this thing, or that thing. The book was done written when the characters were born.

Every bit of software wants you to be "social." What ever happened to being grumpy and alone in your writer's fugue?

There are some who side with Belushi in his disputes with Beatts and Shuster, saying the sketches they were writing, especially early on, simply weren't that good and that he was right to reject them. Marilyn Miller is one who endorses that theory. Miller found that John would jump at parts that gave him a chance to act. "More than anything," Miller says, "he wanted to succeed at that.

If I wasn't such a bad woman on the page, I couldn't be such a good woman in life.

He'd write a character for himself. His character would be tall, much taller than he is now. And his sisters would recognize him as dashing. He'd have personal freedom, his own, a way to escape, to escape from them all.

When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

Publishing your first fiction is somewhat like sailing during hurricane season.

I dropped my penny in the well of dreams, Into a deep, dark, distant, delayed splash. The world was everything that thinks and seems When I was twelve years old and dogging off Into a free mind, writing reams and reams— Invisible paper, invisible ink … from "Disenchantments