Quotes About Writing

My gut is so strong. I feel like I have a lot of books in me, and they're going to come out because I said so. It's going to happen.

Gutless is a strong word, do you know what I mean? It doesn't take a lot of guts to sit behind a laptop at a match and write it.

'Back to Blood' really took it out of me. While I was writing it, I just never went out anywhere, except to the gym.

If you're chained to a computer all day, you're not using up much energy, even if you drag yourself to the gym a couple of days a week. And to make matters worse for me, I've had a secondary career right along with my romance writing - cookbook author, under my real name, Ruth Glick.

Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it's like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in.

The habit I've developed is to write in any free half hour I might find.

What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English teacher, but she was a writer.

I don't know if I have good habits, but I'm very devoted to writing. I'm very compulsive about having a project, at least one, and trying to follow the business as much as I can. I keep on top of all the entertainment business news.

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care.

To write fiction is to think that you're doing it wrong - that your work habits are inhibiting you; that you've chosen the wrong subject; that you've chosen the right subject, but that someone else has, unbeknownst to you, already written exactly the book you're laboring over.

I don't know if I have writing habits. Writing is impossible and every time I have to do it I kind of forget how.

You always feel like a hack and a fraud when you're writing. It's just how it goes.

My father was weaned on books. I'm halfway between being weaned on books and weaned on television. And if you're weaned on television, you're not as good a writer as if you were weaned on books.

I go to the House of Lords in the afternoon and try to walk halfway. I may be thinking about what I'm going to write. It's much more satisfying than sitting in a chair.

I'm a very laboured writer. I hammer it out sentence by sentence, and it takes a long time. That's what the work is, right? To make the reader think it is not hard to do.

As writers, our craft makes us sit alone at a desk and hammer away at our novel. Doing that day in and day out makes it really easy to forget that there's a whole community of writers out there, and they love contributing to other writers' success!

At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.

When you're a comedian, and you show up on set to a job where you're not writing, and you get handed material that's as good as we do on 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine,' you just feel lucky every day.

In TIME June 7, 2010 On the sustainability of the publishing industry, in the Chicago Tribune: I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers.... The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175. - 5/26/10

Tulip: Okay, let me tell you what you're doing here-- you're writing a story. You've got the plot and dialogue from Melrose Place and fucking Baywatch, and you're writing yourself a little story in your head... The trouble is, you're using me as one of the characters.

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

Be a writer, if you will Or don't, no one will care Order your shelves, or not Kill or kiss your darlings Simply write

Garth on naming characters I spend lots of time on all the names in the books... Sabriel herself, I tried many different combinations of different words, trying to create a new name. In fact, her name comes from trying to combine the heraldic term for black which is Sable, because I wanted something that felt dark and mysterious, with the iel ending that you find in angels' names.

Sometimes people ask me, 'Why did you write a strong young woman character?' I just thought she was more interesting than if she was a young man.