Quotes About Writing

Writing a screenplay, for me, is like juggling. It's like, how many balls can you get in the air at once? All those ideas have to float out there to a certain point, and then they'll crystallize into a pattern.

I used to write fiction, non-fiction, fiction, non-fiction and have a clear pattern because I'd need a break from one style when going into the next book.

I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.

Paul just had a way about him that was different. I was really attracted to his writing.

I didn't really start writing about the church in earnest until the mid-2000s, so I wasn't present for or a participant in a lot of the John Paul II-era debates about papal authority.

I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.

You write a book and you hope somebody will go out and pay $24.95 for what you've just said. I think books were my salvation. Books saved me from being miserable.

I had casually rented an apartment that cost $75 a month because I expected my writing to pay my way.

Foreign journalists have to have an approved interpreter assigned them, which they have to pay for, who also acts as guide. As an Iranian, even writing for foreign media, I've been mercifully unrestricted.

As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.

I pay attention to the actors and stuff, but not even that much. I don't pay attention to who's writing.

When you're a litigator, you write so much, so many briefs, over and over again, that you're kind of really focused on one document and have draft after draft, and really pay attention to every single word.

Writing isn't manual labor. Nor is it emptying the dishwasher or paying bills. It's work, sure, but sometimes it should be fun.

I've ended up feeling fonder of 'The Paying Guests' than of any of my other novels.

On the other hand, now that I'm not dependent on fiction for my income, I've been writing more short stories despite the fact that there's no real paying market for short horror other than Cemetery Dance.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.

I enjoy journalism; anybody does. You see the results immediately; you've got an immediate audience instead of having to wait for your audience as you do if you're writing a book, and you get a bit of money coming in, and you can see more clearly how you're paying the bills. But it's not a good position for the serious novelist to be in.

I'm really not used to people paying attention to my writing.

The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization.

When you're a mid-list writer, it pays to write fast.

I'm extremely grateful that I found writing, but it doesn't make it any more peaceful.

I have two young children, and I will say that motherhood is its own peak, just like in the process of writing: one climbs and is continuously moving with each book. Becoming a mother is the greatest connection I've ever felt to being spiritual.

Even if Pearl S. Buck hadn't spent most of her life in China, she'd have every right to write about it.

In literature there was always an epiphany - a tingling moment, sometimes buried - the pearl around which the whole work formed.