Quotes About Writing

My writing has a lot to do with who I am, and what my life is like, and my relationships to people.

One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.

I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure. It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.

A writer doesn't solve problems. He allows them to emerge.

I felt like I had experienced a lot of things in the first chapter of my life, and I wanted it to inspire and motivate people, so I just started writing.

Always write as if you are talking to someone. It works. Don't put on any fancy phrases or accents or things you wouldn't say in real life.

I look on my life as raw material for my novels: that's just the way I am, and it frees me from any inhibitions.

I wouldn't write anything autobiographical. If you've lived a life like Laurence of Arabia, it might be a consideration, but otherwise it's a little bit vain, it seems to me.

We write to taste life twice," Anais Nin wrote, "in the moment and in retrospection.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw.

I see life as increasingly complex, vivid, colorful, crazy, chaotic. That's the world I write about...the world I live in.

Writing is really wonderful art. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job as writers is to just notice them and bring them to life.

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.

If you can discover what you like, if you can discover what you truly believe about most of the major matters of life, you will be able to write a story which is honest and original and unique.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.