Quotes About Writing

I'm spectacularly disorganised. I wrote my latest book in seven different notebooks scattered throughout my house.

Basically, I'm motivated to write about sociopolitical issues as well as relationships. I think those themes have stayed with me throughout my life.

Wintertime for me is a time when I do a lot of my writing in the studio. It's a time I enjoy. And it's very reflective and a very calming time of the year. Throughout the year I gather a lot of musical inspirations, and this is where I bring them to the studio and see what will evolve musically.

I've been playing the Wolfenstein games since I was a kid, and feel that their outlandish sensibility has deeply influenced my own writing and directing throughout my career.

I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it. I don't write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.

Cut your manuscript ruthlessly but never throw anything away: it's amazing how often a discarded scene or description, which wouldn't fit in one place, will work perfectly later.

You can throw a novel into focus with one overheard line.

I throw ideas out into the open when I really should just be writing them down in a journal.

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

I busted out of the place in a hurry and went to a saloon and drank beer and said that for the rest of my life I'd never take a job in a place where you couldn't throw cigarette butts on the floor. I was hooked on this writing for newspapers and magazines.

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away.

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.

I paint very messy. I throw paint around. So when I let myself do the same sort of thing with my writing, and I would just write and write and write and revise, that's when I found my rhythm in writing.

I used to write in a local coffee shop, but there was another guy, another writer, who kept sitting in my favorite seat. I would show up, and he would be there, and I would get exiled to a couch or something, and it would throw me off my game.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

When I write a play, and we read it for the first time, the great fear is that everybody is going to say, 'You're a bum and you can't write. This stinks.' and throw the script in the garbage. The great hope is that they're all going to lift me up on their shoulders and carry me to the streets, singing, 'He's a genius, he's a genius!'

Often as a writer, you get your first draft out, and then you look and think, 'Now, what have I got here.' You're really just throwing mud at the wall and then going, 'Oh, there's a pattern there.'

To bring down your credit card balances, write down the benefits of reducing your debt. No more gnawing feeling that you're throwing money away, perhaps. More money flowing to other financial objectives. Then consult the list when you have doubts.

I think I realized very early on that you can spend a lot of time constructing a really perfect scene in final draft and just end up throwing it away because you didn't figure out that mathematics of the story first.

The problem with writing a book about bulimia is that whenever you go to the washroom, people think you're throwing up.

I don't know much about writing a show or being a show-runner on a show, but I can only imagine that when you first cast a show and you first do a pilot, there are so many components that you're throwing into the mix and you're not sure how they're going to develop.