Quotes About Writing

I knew I wanted to write professionally and get paid.

The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work, and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you, anyway.

Professionally, my first book came out at the age of 29, where I wrote about my experiences of backpacking in U.S. on a frugal budget.

We're professionals, and we know we want to write.

Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it.

Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.

I frequently have scenes that take place in places I've never been or characters who have professions that I know nothing about that I've got to research. But that's what Google is for.

Professor Al Drake encouraged me to just write the way I talk. I decided if that's what I needed to do, I didn't need to be in school to do it.

I had, in college, a professor called Walter Jackson Bate, and he taught a course called The Age of Johnson. It's about Samuel Johnson and his period, 18th-century British writing. So we all got to endure Samuel Johnson, and Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is now my favorite book. I read it all the time I can; it's great for going to sleep.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.

When I was at UCLA, a professor there encouraged me to write, and so I looked into specializing in creative writing in the English Department. And through that, I started writing plays.

I wanted to write a book about Hemingway's Paris, but a professor beat me to it. I suddenly realized other people were making a living off all the things that have to do with my family background so I've got one good story to tell and I'm telling it.

I've always felt a great affinity with music. I've felt myself to be more of a musician than anything else, though I'm not proficient in any one instrument. But I think I have a musical sense of things... and writing seems to me to be a musical experience - rhythmically and in many other ways.

I didn't go into journalism thinking it would solidify my identity. I did it because I needed to make a living, and I was proficient in writing. But in becoming a journalist, I learned about other people who felt like they were on the edges of American mainstream life.

For me, when I go in to write a profile, and no ground rules are laid down, and I'm there to write an on-the-record profile and cover readings while in the room, then that means it's on the record.

I still believe that my main purpose is to better inform the world. Sometimes that's done with infusions of my opinion, sometimes it's done with numbers, and sometimes it's done through writing a profile or, in this case, doing a sit down interview. But I feel that's my job.

I'm happy, I would say that I'm one of the happiest people I know but I've certainly had periods of profound sadness, depression and heartache and those are the kind of things that are interesting to me to write about.

I do think that the abiding mystery of my origins has definitely had a profound effect upon my writing. There is that thing in the back of my mind where I think I don't really know who I am. And it may make it a little easier to shift around in my narrative voice.

Sports journalism is in the midst of an identity crisis so profound that we no longer know whether we're made up of one word or two.

I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.

I realized that everything I had to do I could not do on my own, and so I was almost obliged to put myself in God's hands, to trust in Jesus who - while I wrote my book on him - I felt bound to by an old and more profound friendship.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

My writing, like everything I do, comes profoundly from my heart. I believe that if you follow your heart you will be successful in one way or another. Old-fashioned as that might sound, the philosophy is true.