Quotes About Writing

But how can one write a book with any integrity," he wonders, "if there is no assurance of the few years time any good book takes?

People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I've been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it's the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?

Who's to say what a 'literary life' is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don't need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!

I've only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.

A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.

Passionate attraction to someone of the opposite sex will make a hero or a fool of a novelist each time.

Being the Novelist-in-Residence at a riad hotel in the kasbah of an Arabic North African city is a lot like trying to write one's memoirs on shreds of napkins in a nuthouse.

If a writer writes something that he or she has never experienced, I think the reader can sense right away that it is garbage. The only thing that can replace experience, though, is imagination; however it takes experience to grow an imagination.

I believe you can consider yourself a successful prose writer when the number of words you put on a page each day is equal to, or greater than, the number of milligrams of mind-altering chemicals you ingest in that day. (Note: this rule does not apply to poets who write in the short-form. You, my boys and girls, are free as birds!)

Learn to write well and you will walk on water and turn wine into opium. You will speak a thousand new tongues and talk to the gods. You will live in constant and everlasting euphoria.

All that I ask out of life is that it be constant and unending euphoria. And so, I make love and I write.

Religious nationalism takes an extreme form in communal historical writing.

There are three primal urges in human beings: food, sex, and rewriting some else's play.

When this is all over, my writing will add up to the sum total of me. The choices I make with my writing have a lot to do with myself as an unfolding personality, so that in the end your writing is really your destiny. It's a question of finding that central thing that's yours to say and yours alone.

I've been leading newsrooms for a while now and it's been an honor serving as Editor in Chief of N.J., but I really think that my best shot at moving the needle in politics is by getting close to it - by reading, reporting, tweeting and writing.

Die unglaubliche Reise des Smithy Ide – Ron McLarty Lieblingszitat: "Lieber Smithy, das hier ist mein Brief an dich, aber ich werde ihn nicht abschicken. Ich schreibe am Fenster in meinem Zimmer, und das Fenster ist offen. Der Ahorn draußen in unserem Garten raschelt, und ich lasse es vom Wind zu dir tragen, denn er kann das, und ich glaube wirklich, dass Worte fliegen können." S. 249

I'm writing a book on Procrastination. I hope to start it tomorrow. I've been thinking about it for almost six years now.

I'm writing a new book called 'Ventroliquism for Dummies'.

Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take to the pen and pour them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside: then all that ink and labor are wasted, because I can't print the result.

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

I look at my life today, the things I value most about myself—my imagination, my love of acting, my passion for writing, my love of learning, my curiosity—all come from how I was parented and taught. And none of these qualities that I've just mentioned—none of these qualities that I prize so deeply, that have brought me so much joy, that have brought me so much professional success—none of these qualities that make me who I am…can be tested.

Once you've sharpened your observation skills and taken notes about what you've seen, you need to create the little world in your mind where your story will take place. Because if it doesn't exist there, it won't stand a chance of existing in your reader's mind.

Writing that is only about a time is not literature, it is history.