Quotes About Writing

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

The writing life is a secret life, wither we admit it or not.

When I was a boy, my parents were writers and they owned a bookstore, 'The Complete Traveler in New York,' so writing and books have held special places in my heart all my life.

Literature has become my life.

The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level.

When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual.

Writing is a fearsome but grand vocation—potentially healing but likewise deadly. I wouldn't trade my life for the world.

I like the job I have, but if I had to live my life over again, I would like to have ended up a sports writer.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing

The process of writing, any form of creativity, is a power intensifying life.

I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

The part of my writing I find the most rewarding is when people write to me or speak to me in public to tell me how his or her life has been changed by my books.

I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability.

I've taken off two months, three months at a time, and, by the end, I get really squirrelly. My night life, my dream life, gets extremely populated and crazed.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

Take painsto write a neat round, plain hand, and you will find it a great convenience through life to write a small and compact hand as well as a fair and legible one.

Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

We do not write as we want, but as we can.

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.