Quotes About Writing

How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?

One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

I can't point to a moment or incident that made me see that this business, this putting down words on paper, was what I would do for the rest of my lucid life. But apparently, that is my calling.

My life is very busy with a lot of things, and so I don't get uninterrupted time. When I do, I can just write all day.

Through writing, through that process, they realize that they become more intelligent, and more honest and more imaginative than they can be in any other part of their life.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

My comedy notebooks are filled with random journal entries. It's all the same. I can look back on old joke notebooks, and know exactly what was going on in my life.

I've found in my own life that if my writing isn't going well, not much else will. It is the one constant, the key to everything else.

Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence. The advantage of this method is that you end up with something for which you will not be personally blamed.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

Here's the thing: The book that will most change your life is the book you write.

There has to be a certain relationship between the life and the writing style, and that is really a problem.

I want to be an author/director and I'm writing my second book now and I want to make a movie of it, and I hope I get to do this for the rest of my life.

Not writing would be like going the rest of your life without having dreams.

...for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.

I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature.

I've always been a journal-keeper. I've always tried to write about how I'm experiencing life, and my feelings and thoughts.

This is the life I live, and this is the stuff I experience. And like any good writer, I should just write about what goes in my life and what goes on around me. So that's what I chose to do.

I write to figure out what I am thinking: What does my life mean?

Do I like to write? Why? About what? Will I give up and say, "Living and feeding a man's insatiable guts and begetting children occupies my whole life. Don't have time to write"?

I've been in perfect health and perfectly happy all my life. I don't take any pills; I just get up, clean up after my wife, and start typing every day.