Quotes About Writing

Above all, have a good time. If you aren't enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it.

O why do I ever let anyone read what I write! Every time I have to go through a breakfast with a letter of criticism I swear I will write for my own praise or blame in future. It is a misery.

The world was going on as usual. All the time she was writing the world had continued.

If there was no other motive in view [except] to have the privilege of reading over our journals and for our children to read, it would pay for the time spent in writing it.

One should write not unskillfully in the running hand, be able to sing in a pleasing voice and keep good time to music; and, lastly, a man should not refuse a little wine when it is pressed upon him.

Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.

To be in a position, at my age, where I am financially independent, I can help develop things, I can promote stuff that I believe in, I can say no a lot and spend time writing - that is a gift.

I've been a professional writer for 20 years, and there are contours in that time, crescents and troughs.

Writing is a creatively rewarding occupation but for me very time consuming.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

I wanted to be a journalist for a long time.

My employer was never at any time aware of anything in my past beyond the writing I did, because, frankly, it isn't relevant to the job I was asked to do, which was to be a reporter.

Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting.

And I used to write novels and little stories and compositions and I - but I put them away because I started acting when I was 17. So there wasn't much time.

As authors, we all expect criticism from time to time, and we all have our ways of coping with unfriendly reviews.

I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.

I learned that lesson a long time ago. When you write popular fiction, you're going to get bashed by critics.

I figured somebody wrote a story who had a typewriter and I thought that movies were made by the cowboys and that they just said, 'Okay, you fall off the horse this time.

I like to write on airplanes... that forced meditation time when you have nothing else to do, so your mind is allowed to go to places it wouldn't otherwise go.

It didn't feel difficult at the time because I was so charged up about both books. Afterward, however, I was pretty tired. In a good way, like after a great workout.

Every time I write a nonfiction book I get sued.

I'm supposed to be taking time off. But I'm still writing and I have this Gap advert lined up.