Quotes About Writing

I'm interested in ways of writing about the social world that don't assassinate the life that's in it

It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one.

There's a magical part of it (writing obituaries), too, which is you're trying to breathe life back into someone who has just died. You're trying to conjure them up.

Touring has been a new part of my life in a lot of ways. We've just been touring massively since the record came out and before. Learning how to write while all that is going on is a new thing.

The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life.

Writing fulfils an insatiable drive. Finishing the story satisfies my thirst. But I must keep drinking until the story quenches a buyer.

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases.

I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing.

If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.

I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

I've always felt alienated. I realized that I've been terrified my entire life. So I can identify that fear which drives so many of the people that I write about.

In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.

I've published one book before, and now I'm writing a book of essays and stories about life in Tokyo. And I have one book coming out in May in Germany, about fitness.

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have.

I finished the [blog] post reflecting on the fact that, despite all the changes in my life, maybe I wasn't so different after all. If I typed it, maybe I could believe it, too.

it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it

When you ask, did writing change my life? It totally changed my life. It gave me my life.

The New Testament has had a really powerful effect on how I write and how I live my life.

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.

If you want to write something of length, however modern and radical, you must live the life of an elderly gentleman of the 1950s.

Nothing needs to happen to a writer's life after they are 20. By then they've experienced more than enough to last their creative life.

I told my whole life story in my book.

It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.