Quotes About Writing

I came to accept in myself a long time ago that I really do like writing articulate sociopaths.

By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.

We're the only branch of government that explains itself in writing every time itmakes a decision.

Writing fiction takes me out of time. I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That's probably as close to immortal as we'll ever get.

Most writers flourish greatly on a simple, healthy routine with occasional time off for gaiety.

I used to go to the library all the time when I was kid. As a teenager, I got a book on how to write jokes at the library, and that, in turn, launched my comedy career.

Letters remind us that when we write we can bring back the best of times, even make time stand still, if only for a few minutes.

The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs'.

When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.

It's my language, the language I speak. I've spent a lot more time playing music than talking or writing.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

He started keeping a journal - had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.

I think I'm way too much of a control freak to co-author anything with anyone. I have a hard enough time writing with myself! I admire people that can do it, but it's not for me.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time

It was very interesting time to be in England. Even at that point [John] Lennon and [Paul] McCartney influenced my writing. I thought, "maybe there is a huck or two in here I haven't thought of".

The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.

There'll come a writing phase where you have to defend the time, unplug the phone and put in the hours to get it done.

Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer.

I generally blog between 5:30 A.M. and 7 A.M. I will from time to time add something during the day, but for the most part blogging is an early morning activity for me.

And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone.

By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts had to do with a lynching.

A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family's asleep and I'm alone, I think about the next day's writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page.