Quotes About Writing

In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.

What I see as the particularly exciting prospect for writing horror fiction as we go forward is setting stories in more internal landscapes than external ones, mapping out the mind as the home for scary things instead of the house at the end of the lane or lakeside campground or abandoned amusement park.

I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.

I grew up watching 'Porridge' and it's so loved, it was a daunting prospect to take on. Fortunately, it was written by the original writers, Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who are comedy gods.

I generally don't think of prospective actors when I write.

It may sound very strange, but I love the freedom that writing a novel gives me. It is an unhindered experience. If I come after a bad day, I can decide that my protagonist will die on page 100 of my novel in a 350-page story.

When I was writing my first novel, 'Elizabeth is Missing,' I was writing the only novel I had ever written and writing about the only protagonist I'd ever written about. Because of this, I didn't think of her as a construct. Maud was real.

I think every writer has got to direct. If you don't direct, you can't protect your work. The only way to ensure that it's going to be as close as possible to what you put down on paper - and what you see and hear in your head - is to do it yourself.

Oddly, I feel more protected when I write in Italian, even though I'm also more exposed.

The only thing that's really important is the stuff he wrote. That's what he cared about, and that's what's worth protecting. The myth and the man time eventually separates. But the work endures.

The only protection as a historian is to institute a process of research and writing that minimizes the possibility of error. And that I have tried to do, aided by modern technology, which enables me, having long since moved beyond longhand, to use a computer for both organizing and taking notes.

Once I start writing about somebody, I become very protective of them.

Back in high school, I had this folk protest band, and I used to write all the time. And then, when I got in The B-52s, we began to write collectively, collaboratively - most all of our songs are written by jamming together.

My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.

I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.

My work is very carefully researched. Sometimes I have to ditch an idea because I can't prove it.

I decided to write books, just to prove to myself that I was still alive, if nothing else.

Travel writing is harrowing. You are in paradise, more or less, having to prove it is paradise. It is hard to have a good time trying to figure out a way to say you are having a good time, whether you are having it or not, even in paradise.

I write the shopping column. I think I've proven my superficiality.

I write because I actually enjoy writing. It's a plus and a fringe benefit that, you know, I can actually provide for my family and, you know, a few people know my name - that's great.

One would never write a single word if one knew the horrors that lay ahead,' agreed Charlotte. 'But if you sell copies by the sackload, you may well forget the horrors,' I agreed quickly.

No one will write books once they reach heaven, but there is an excellent library, containing all the books written up to date, including all the lost books and the ones that the authors burned when they came back from the last publisher.

Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.

He delighted in writing, in the joinery and embellishment of his sentences, in the consciousness of high rare virtue when every word had been used in its purest and most precise sense, in the kitten games of syntax and rhetoric. Words could do anything except generate their own meaning.