Quotes About Writing

There's no real formula for doing it, it's either just living life and writing down a joke you think of in the middle of the day and then pieces those together later.

The writer's life is a life of revisions.

when I talk about a writing life, I'm talking about a life in which writing is the dominant response to living.

Pivotal to a happy writing life is a practice of daily personal writing.

Reading has made such a profound difference to my life. I'm sure I became a writer because of the power of literature in my own life.

As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.

You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.

I made the choice long ago to write about real life. And life is both serious and funny.

Anyone who can only write about themselves or their life experiences, in my mind, isn't a very good writer.

Acting can be a very reactive profession. Acting is a fantastic thing, and it's my life, but writing is also part of me too, so I did it and in so doing took responsibility for my own life.

I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you're faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write…But this is life on earth, you can't have everything.

Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. 'And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another.

When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer.

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.

The time comes in life when we have read enough. It's time to stop reading. It's time to lay down the books and write.

I've been writing most of my life; it's just something I do.

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

... I had always written but I never took it seriously. It was a way of life, not a living.