Quotes About Writing

If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.

I've always written a little bit. I mean, I've written screenplays, and I've doctored my dialogue for years, and I've written speeches - I was a speechwriter on 'The West Wing,' so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I'd write a book.

I've been writing since I came to Nashville when I was 17. I've been blessed to have written with so many of the biggest names around. They took me under their wing and taught me the ways of writing. They saw something special in me, which feels great. Every song on my record is going to be original, and that's just a really cool feeling.

I'm not much of an outliner in general. I tend to wing my way through all my drafts, which means writing a series is a very chaotic and panic-inducing experience.

My first seven novels were contemporary spiritual novels, my next nine had strong elements of fantasy, and now I'm writing thrillers, more as a choice to spread my wings than anything. Writers, like good wine, should mature with age.

Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study.

When I came out of service, the first couple of releases didn't really hit so I just took a little hiatus and sat down to see what was happening. I just glued my ears to the radio and then I started writing - the first hit record that came out was 'Everybody Loves a Winner.'

My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer, that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery - which was good for me, because I like to have something to prove.

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.

The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'

I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.

I got an English degree in college and then went to law school because I didn't know what else to do. I was a lawyer in Houston, Texas. I started writing plays and screenplays, and after about three years of practicing, I decided I would move to Los Angeles and give it a shot.

I guess what led to me writing 'Holes' was having moved to Texas in 1991, and it was sort of my reaction to Texas.

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.

I very seldom compose anything in my head which later finds its way into text, except character names sometimes - I'm often very much inspired by things that I misunderstand.

I do not write for the reader to come, but for him who is here, short of reading the text on my shoulder.

Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink.

If I'm going really, really fast, I can do a page of finished text a day, on average.

Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.

I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text.

I have been doodling since childhood. I have a passion for illustrating but cannot paint or colour for that matter. I illustrate what I am trying to communicate through my writing. My images are like drawings in a science text book.

I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.