Quotes About Writing

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

I have read a thousand screenplays, and I have acted in a handful of them, and I have felt when it feels good, the writing, and it feels natural, and feels funny or sad or honest or whatever it may be. You connect. And I felt when it feels like writing, when it feels stale, or when it feels artificial or forced, or too theatrical or whatever.

The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.

If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?

I write so that people will read what I write. I don't want to write a book that a thousand people read, or just privileged people read. I want to write a book whose emotional truth people can understand. For me, that's what it's about.

I was a house dad. Once, my wife was working as a dispatcher at the fire department, and I was staying home and writing while baby-sitting my son, who hardly ever slept. So I wrote in twenty-minute patches. Some of that early stuff is just dreadful. I got a thousand rejects.

You don't write a book. You write a sentence and then a paragraph and then a page and then a chapter. Looking at writing 400 plus pages or seventy thousand odd words is incredibly daunting, but if you just focus on the immediate picture - say, 500 words - it's not so overwhelming.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

I always felt that it was easier to take a funny person and teach them to write television than to take somebody who was a television writer and make them funny.

Good writing is good writing. In many ways, it's the audience and their expectations that define a genre. A reader of literary fiction expects the writing to illuminate the human condition, some aspect of our world and our role in it. A reader of genre fiction likes that, too, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the story.

Don't ever trust anyone who's writing a book. They make up lies for a living.

Sometimes I wonder if I talk to myself becuase I'm a writer, or if I'm a writer because I talk to myself

I'd always admired writers. I'd always loved words on a page. Somehow, words seemed to bypass image and get straight to the heart of things. Somehow, words seemed big enough to contain pain, and sentences could pull broken bits together.

said maybe I will call myself Ross H. Spencer. I said he can't write either.

In Florence, more than anywhere else, large numbers of people could read and write, as many as seven in every ten adults. The literacy levels of other European cities, by contrast, languished at less than 25 percent.

The Latin verb "to fasten" was pangere, from which, via the Latin pagina, the word "page" descends. Suddenly it was possible to read a document by turning pages of parchment rather than unspooling a roll of papyrus.

If you got to talking to most cowboys, they'd admit they write 'em. I think some of the meanest, toughest sons of bitches around write poetry.

As a man writes his fiction, his fiction is writing him. We can never change ourselves back into what we were, any more than I can change these printed words. So we have to be careful about what we write.

It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes," [T.S. Eliot] wrote, "who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.

For the WriterChicks…a brain trust without equal, a circle of friends who never let go, and women I love with my whole heart.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

An author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again. Say you go in and discover that there are no copies of your book on the shelves. You resent all the other books - I don't care if they are Great Expectations, Life on the Mississippi and the King James Bible that are on the shelves.

The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.' -- Roy Blount Jr.