Quotes About Writing

Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present. It's what history and politics share - a vantage on the past - that makes writing the history of politics fraught. And it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence.

The past is what's written down. It is very quiet; only people who can write make any sound at all.

TO WRITE SOMETHING down doesn't make it true. But the history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail.

To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind. Stories are full of power and force; they seethe with meaning, with truths and lies, evasions and honesty. Speech often has far more weight and urgency than writing. But most words, once spoken, are forgotten, while writing lasts, a point observed early in the seventeenth century by an English vicar named Samuel Purchas.

I think language beautifully full of the poetry of immanent clarification of some small pinprick of what living might mean. Fuck. Why else would anyone care to spend a life writing sentences?

metawriting can be viewed as "the act of doing something outside of the game in order to impact what is actually occurring in the game.

She was a good if sloppy writer.

A good writer is not necessarily a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

New rule: every fantasy author who doesn't treat horses like tireless hairy motorcycles automatically gets a Hugo.

I've said for years — ever since I figured out how to write Goblin Hero — that it's important to give yourself permission to write crap. Perfection is the destroyer of art. It's paralyzing. Art, whether it's writing or painting or anything else, requires risk. And risk means you're going to make mistakes. Sometimes you're going to fail.

On a related note, I think for many of us, the first step in becoming a good writer is to write crap. In all seriousness, none of us are born knowing how to write. Almost all of us will produce a lot of really lousy stories before we start to get good. (Not all of us will choose to publish those lousy stories, but that's a whole separate discussion...)

There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.

Being a writer requires an intoxication with language.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

During those 41/2 hours of focused morning work, Peter was able to write nearly twice as much as had sitting at his desk for up to ten hours a day in previous years.

Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.

It's not the tales of Stephen King that I've read, I need protection from the things in my head . . .

I didn't plan to be the rude middle-class comedian. You write a certain type of joke that you find funny, and mine happen to be often rude. Yes, it's juvenile, but that's me.

Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write.

D)ialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. 'When you're writing lines...you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

Those golden minutes before you are completely awake, when your mind is just drifting, you have no censorship you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That's when I come up with the best and worst ideas. That is the privilege of being a writer - that you can stay in bed for an hour in the morning and it's work time.

It's the books I love best that are the hardest to write about. I don't want to take one angle on them, I want to dive into them and quote huge chunks and tell you everything about them, and it just isn't possible.

Kids are really good at ignoring the heavy-handed message and getting with the fun parts. It's good they are, because adults have devoted a lot of effort writing them message thinly disguised as stories and clubbing children over the head with them.