Quotes About Writing

When I get started each day, I read through and correct the previous day's 2,000 words, then start on the next. As I reach that figure, I try to simply stop and not go on until reaching a natural break. If you just stop while you know what you're going to write next, it's easier to get going again the next day.

A good journalist, as you know, is a great listener. And so's a good writer. And I got to listen to people for almost 20 years. That serves me well, I hope, when I try to understand how a character might be feeling, or how they might react.

You get fan mail and you see the reaction when you write someone back. It's kind of shocking. You can make someone's day and be a positive influence on the world when you're in a position like that.

It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.

You don't know when you are immersed in a book what the reaction to it will be, but I feel great about 'The Lake of Dreams.'

We try to not write stories based on reaction. We try to write them based on character integrity as we understand it and observe it.

The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.

The negative reactions to 'The Number of the Beast' were strange. When we wrote it, we never expected anything like that.

I don't think you can write from a reactive place. I think you just write the thing you want to write about, and if other people are writing about it, that doesn't really come to bear on what you want to do.

Sarcasm doesn't read sarcastic in print.

The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago.

I'm a big reader. And I take a lot of pictures, do a lot of writing.

I contend that in the kind of nonfiction I write, and that other people also pursue, anything is permissible provided the reader knows what you're taking liberties with.

I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.

When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

I think humor is a very serious thing. I use it as a way of weakening the reader's defenses so that I can more easily take him to something more.

Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.

There's a difference between describing and evoking something. You can describe something and be quite clinical about it. To evoke it, you call it up in the reader. That's what writers do when they're good.

I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.

Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.

The very best way I can make any reader believe in the nuts and bolts of an art form... is to know the mechanics, to make the characters grounded in convincing detail.