Quotes About Writing

Écrire, me dit-elle tristement, c'est dur. Ce doit être ce qu'il y a de plus exigeant au monde... pour que ce soit vrai, tu comprends!

I write fiction for lots of reasons. One is power. I'm in charge when I write. So are you. You create the world of the story. You make the rules.

I don't wait for inspiration. Writing is my job.

Admirers of Jefferson might best be advised to skip everything he ever wrote about women and restrict their attention to the Declaration of Independence.)

One of the notebooks was for musings and pep talks. ... The other notebooks were for writing out the novel the way authors had done for centuries.

What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.

The Four Noble Truths for writers. 1. Writers write. 2. Writing is a process. 3. You don't know what your writing will be until the end of the process. 4. If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.

He began to view writing as a petty ambition, a frivolous and indulgent whim, creativity itself as the pathology of the very young or very stupid.

Through an arbitrary problem, I had arrived at a tenet of good writing: brevity wins.

I write first drafts by hand. Never do I open an umbrella inside the house. I don't predict wins or losses. I used to stand on a certain piece of rug if my brothers and husband were watching football and their team got in trouble - but now the luck went out of that rug. If a circle is involved, I try to go clockwise.

If you write a good line, you write a good line, and the best line wins in television. It doesn't matter if you're the guy who gets the coffee or if you're the showrunner - best line wins. That's the beauty of television collaboration.

I realized there might be monetary or financial reasons to jump in and write a 'Winter's Bone Retriumphs' or something, and nobody would object to me doing that in publishing. But it would be a waste of my time, and they always take a little longer than you thought they would take.

I find it easier to write in the winter in Melbourne. When the weather is good you want to go out for a walk, ride a bike, go to a cafe or something. When it's raining, when it's a miserable day, I just sit down at my desk and get some work done.

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.

In my book 'The Winter Sea,' set north of Aberdeen, I couldn't just ignore the fact some people there - especially the people in the past - would speak the Doric.

One of my biggest influences, of course, is David Simon and his work on 'The Wire.'

The scripts of 'The Wire' are fantastic - the scripts of 'Breaking Bad,' the scripts of 'Mad Men,' the scripts of 'The Sopranos,' the scripts of 'Battlestar Galactica.' You could keep going on. They're incredibly well written.

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

The writing in those HBO dramas, like 'The Wire,' is as good as anything I've seen.

Sometimes I think 'The Wire' said it all, and I might as well not write any more crime novels.

I want to be read. When you write a TV show like 'The Wire,' you've got three to four million readers watching your work. Even Grisham doesn't sell that many books.

I never went to a writing school, so 'The Wire' was my writing school.

I believed God had wired me as a writer for a purpose, and I was squandering that purpose. I finally repented of doing things my way and told God that, in the future, I would only write books that glorified Him. That meant I had to buy back some of my contracts.

In all honesty, my favorite place to write is an anonymous, cheap hotel in a city or town where nobody knows me, the wireless service is spotty, and the adjoining gas station has coffee, beer and junk food.