Quotes About Writing

I've always liked police-blotter kind of writing, or the writing of a policeman, right to the point and hardboiled. That's how I see at least the prose elements of scriptwriting.

I really - I don't take my work that seriously, and I think that's what keeps me loose. If I try to write, if I catch myself trying to write, I'll fall right on my face. I'll see it. If I see in the prose that I'm - 'Boy, look at me writing,' I rewrite it. I rewrite it because I don't, because I think it's distracting.

In prose, I think you sometimes have to write in very plain language, where every line may not seem to be so important, though in all writing every line is important.

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.

There's a half-conscious state you enter when you're actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it's the only place where you even are a writer.

I don't like slapdash careless prose, and if I saw myself doing it, I would give up writing altogether.

I come from a prose background. I come from short story background, and that led me into novels.

I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff.

Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.

I'm not as good a prose writer as I'd like to be, but I never aspired to that.

I love writing prose. I really love writing prose. It's very pleasurable for me.

Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.

Television is much more collaborative in many ways than prose.

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

I have written some poetry and two prose books about baseball, but if I had been a rich man, I probably would not have written many of the magazine essays that I have had to do. But, needing to write magazine essays to support myself, I looked to things that I cared about and wanted to write about, and certainly baseball was one of them.

That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.

I am not a great fan of serious, heavy writing. I prefer simple, short sentences, light on prose.

There's music every day. I don't think I could write without it. Not that I listen while I'm writing. It's more hearing a piece of music that I want to somehow convert into prose, as a creative inspiration.

I get asked a lot about writing for games and prose and film, and I will do some, but I can never see myself leaving comics. I love it too much.

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

If you are an autodidact, you probably do write more in the rhythm of speech rather than having learnt prose.

When I ventured into writing at the age of 17, I wanted to be a good and successful writer. I just wanted to write good stuff - poems, prose, stories, essays, everything.

I'm a big admirer of Daniel Woodrell for his beautiful, precise, sparse prose - I don't do succinct well, so I'm in awe of writers who do.

The way we speak is very different from the way we write - especially from the way we write continuous prose.