Quotes About Writing

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

In some respects, big ideas can be a bit too big for a short story - especially if you've only got a couple of thousand words to play with, and you need room for other stuff, like character, description.

I write a thousand words a day.

Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.

I write a thousand words a day, and I always stop in the middle of a scene or thought, and it makes it easy to pick up on the next day.

I'm not Cormac McCarthy, but I can get my point across in a thousand words.

Process does matter; you need a process. What it is is up to no one but you. But if you can't sit down, write once upon a time, and go through however many hundred thousand words to get to happily ever after, you're never going to get anywhere.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.

In my 30s, I wrote in the back house of a ramshackle Spanish Revival we rented across from the ocean in the Santa Monica Canyon. I wrote thousands of pages there, but in order to see another adult human being, I had to steal out through the brambly side of the house, along the driveway down to the street.

I've written thousands of stories, started hundreds of news cycles.

I write nonfiction in this thriller-esque style. I have all the facts; I research it. I have thousands of pages of court documents... I try to get inside my stories.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.

Literally thousands of e-mails over the course of a book go out to people I've never met, people who might end up being the focus of a chapter.

It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.

It's still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day.

I don't type my sentences on an arena's pitch, surrounded by thousands of cheering or booing fans - I don't feel pressure to please a crowd.

Love fanfic or hate it, it's getting thousands of people to read and write who otherwise would not have.

We're more interested in someone writing a really great answer that's going to be read by thousands or tens of thousands of people over the next few years as it stays on Quora and as it gets distributed on the Internet.

I used to write stories on Facebook, and people started reading them, from 10-12 people initially, to thousands of people later.

The history of screenwriting - of what we do - is more than 100 years old. It's thousands of years old, going back to Sophocles and Euripedes. I believe the only - the only - separation for being a dramatist is reading drama.

Because I find writing painful, I try to get it over with as fast as possible. But I write every day, or I lose the thread.

Instead of taking a year off, I started 'Dreamers of the Day' exactly 36 hours after I sent the manuscript for 'A Thread of Grace' to the publisher!