Quotes About Writing

Beyond that, I seem to be compelled to write science fiction, rather than fantasy or mysteries or some other genre more likely to climb onto bestseller lists even though I enjoy reading a wide variety of literature, both fiction and nonfiction.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

Seeing people who are actually reading your book and listening to the wide variety of reactions they have to it, is really special.

I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Sean Penn, for his acting as well as his writing and directing. There are so many actors I respect, but his reach is so wide.

Broadway's never my end goal because of the plays I write. These are tough plays. Of course there's a lot of humor, but my goal is just to reach as wide an audience as possible, however that happens.

While we were promoting 'Wide Open Spaces,' we set aside time to write. We went on several writing retreats where nobody could get hold of us. It was the only way we could take a step back and reflect and write and be living a semi-normal life for a while.

I need quiet and solitude to work. Darkness is best. If I am wide awake, I can't write.

When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.

I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.

If you start writing to an audience you're talking down to them. I've never written for any age group, I just write character. If you can capture that you'll get the audiences, and it will be a wide range, as it is for 'Twilight,' it's a pretty wide range.

I've never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out.

A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.

I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!

I believe that reading widely is the best preparation for writing.

It's been said that I am the most widely read writer of the 20th century. The number of books I've sold runs into untold millions.

As I reflect on the successes and failures of our push for democracy, reading widely in search for a path out of authoritarian rule, I'll keep writing to encourage myself and those on my side.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

I try to write stories that will attract younger readers and make them feel part of a wider readership. I do not feel able to write books that are about, or even for, teenagers; and I am inclined to be suspicious of books which 'target' them.

Finding the voice of a character, no matter who it is - from Black Widow to Han Solo - is the first and most important hurdle for me to cross in any work of fiction.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

When I wrote 'The Pregnant Widow' three or four years ago, I tried to reread my first novel, 'The Rachel Papers,' because their young heroes are the same age. I couldn't finish it. It seemed to me so technically slapdash and weak.

The success of 'The Widow' meant there were expectations for the second book from the first word, and it has created a completely different writing experience. Not to say I haven't enjoyed writing 'The Child,' but I confess there were times when I felt as if I was wrenching it out of my body with bloodied fingernails!