Quotes About Writing

I don't know how I started rapping. The first I did was at school. I tried writing one. I liked it. People started to like it. It was what I wanted to do.

I wrote 'The Match,' my cricket novel, between 2002 and 2005. In retrospect, almost an age of innocence in cricket and a time when it was rare to find the game deep in fiction.

There are some novelists who can get away with writing about sex - Philip Roth, Ian McEwan - but they are rare.

I know the benefits of having a really great improv show are amazing because it was this one rare and fleeting thing that was incredible, but the risk just didn't appeal to me. I liked the control of sitting down and writing things.

Growing up, I was always enthralled by Ronnie Barker. He made my dad howl with laughter, which always intrigued me, and he had the rare gift of being as good a performer as he was a writer.

When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.

I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.

I rarely listen to music while writing. If I don't like it, it bothers me, and if I like it, it absorbs me so much I can't write.

Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.

But it's the particularity of a place, the physical experience of being in a place, that makes it onto the page. That's why I don't just do library research. I very rarely write about somewhere I haven't been.

I'm very lucky. I actually like screenwriting. I rarely feel a sense of doom going to my desk.

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

I rarely listen to music while writing. I wish I could, but it distracts me.

If not for my mom, I wouldn't be a writer today. When I was a little girl, I rarely saw her without a book in her hand.

In an essay, you have the outcome in your pocket before you set out on your journey, and very rarely do you make an intellectual or psychological discovery. But when you write fiction, you don't know where you are going - sometimes down to the last paragraph - and that is the pleasure of it.

Rarely do I try to pull a creature out of life and make it a character.

One of things that drives me nuts is you rarely get bad guys who are written very well.

Rarely does a complete idea come to me. I basically start with just a small scene or a snatch of dialogue and force myself to write and to keep writing. Sometimes it becomes a book.

Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life.

Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.

I just realized at a certain point that no matter how much writing I did, I'm still a gym rat for comedy clubs.

The single greatest line I ever wrote as an analyst was after Lomas said they were hedged: 'The Lomas Financial Corporation is a perfectly hedged financial institution: it loses money in every conceivable interest rate environment.' I enjoyed writing that sentence more than any sentence I ever wrote.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.