Quotes About Writing

I said: 'I'm throwing in my job, and I'm going to write a book.' Everyone thought: 'She's off her trolley,' and it was quite crazy, really. I'm just lucky that it came off.

I never hand in a book until it's completed. Richard Jackson then reads it and asks me to clarify murky points. We work very well together. He knows how hard to push, and I know how hard to push back. He's the only person who can criticize my work without me throwing a hissy fit.

For me, I love exploring ideas and throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what fits, and if I had a really nice collaborative team around me who could deal with the more day-to-day minutia, that would be fun. And directing sometime in the future and writing... yeah, I can see that all in my future. But I can be incredibly lazy.

I have never been depressed or thrown a plate, which I attribute to the cathartic effects of writing books about people whose lives are more grueling than mine.

When I was 22 years old, I thought girls would like me if I wrote a novel. I spent so much time writing that I was thrown out of graduate school.

If I weren't a writer, I think I might have thrown myself more enthusiastically into advertising. But, it's difficult to imagine being a diligent copywriter. It would be quite exasperating for me.

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

No one reads my books until they're finished because I don't want feedback. It confuses me, and it changes things; if I get too much feedback, I get thrown off my path.

I was kind of thrown into - I didn't expect to do this for a living, being a recording artist. I was just playing music for the fun of it and writing songs. That was kind of my escape, you know, from the humdrum of the world.

I've never thrown away a rhyme book.

I don't know if it's good or bad, but when I first started writing I imitated the narrative thrust of a movie. And as I worked, I learned what you can do in fiction that you can't do in movies, and vice-versa.

My entire book was typed with three fingers and a very confident space-bar thumb.

I can't sit and twiddle my thumbs. I have to start writing even if it's miserable some days.

Men there have been who have done the essayist's part so well as to have earned an immortality in the doing; but we have had not many of them, and they make but a poor figure on our shelves. It is a pity that things should be thus with us, for a good essayist is the pleasantest companion imaginable.

Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.

I don't think I could ever give up music. It's what makes me tick. If there was no music, there would be no writing.

I think, when you are writing non-fiction, you feel there's an obligation to get it absolutely right, so all your factual details have to be, have, you know, to go through a long list of them and tick them. I'm not saying that's not important in fiction, but I think you have a bit more leeway; you can suit yourself.

Writing is what I do. It's what makes me tick.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera - or an NHL game.

I keep threatening to write a non-fantasy book, and they keep offering me the kind of money I can't refuse to write a fantasy. That's a good thing. I have to pay my mortgage, and I have to pay for my Chargers season tickets.

I always have a notebook - I have kept diaries since I was eight years old. My preferred choice is a Moleskine because they have a pocket at the back where I can keep airline tickets and my passport.

My first children's book, 'Tickle Monster,' was inspired by tickling my son one evening.

Language is not just a code; you are writing into its history, into its tides.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.