Quotes About Writing

my writing is a wild mustang - more thunderous than a lightning storm -and all my skill which I call art, is devoted to simply staying on...

if you always move in certainty, your writing will be flat - creativity is a rugged terrain...

authority is the unmistakeable tone in the voice of a true writer...

my novels are like life - I never know where they're going until I get to the end...

Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss.

If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen.

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it.

The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

If we write at all, why not use our talents to the best advantage?

Virginia joined John and Richard at the house to model her work with family systems and the three of them collaborated to write the book, Changing with Families.

I can't change overnight into a serious literary author. You can't compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.

I've written 17 novels, and I've found out that fiction can't keep up with real life.

Lord Bacon said, "Writing makes an exact man." He spoke the truth. Writing produces exactitude by forcing you to set down ideas in logical relation to one another. Writing crystallizes your thoughts and makes your ideas specific.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.

I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.

I don't write like this in order to show how clever and well read I am--though I am rather clever and well read as a matter of fact.

A writer is bound to have varying degrees of success, and I think that that is partly an issue of how central the burden of the story is to the author's psyche.

As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.

More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective, that is all that writing is about.

During the eighteen months that followed Halley's visit, Isaac worked day and night on the book. He didn't mind the sacrifice. A living, growing thing took shape before his eyes. Never mind that he ate irregularly. Never mind if he kept at it eighteen hours a day. The book would be worth all the effort.

I so desperately hate to end these movies that the first thing I do when I'm done is write another one. Then I don't feel sad about having to leave and everybody going away.

what the pictures cannot do is express the complexity that might help us understand why these terrible things are happening. Only words can do that. A world that depends more on images and dismisses reading and writing as 'cumbersome' will be a much cruder and probably an even more dangerous place. I