Quotes About Writing

One of the things I have come up against time and again in my career is the notion that because a book is easy to read it was somehow easy to write.

I used to go online all the time, and then I had to stop myself... because I'm a writer, and it's like: to have a procrastination tool, like, within my computer... it was just getting too hairy.

Memory is never complete. There are always parts of it that time has amputated. Writing is a way of retrieving them, of bringing the missing parts back to it, of making it more holistic.

When people, women included, hear that you are writing, they assume that it is simply a hobby to fill in the time between doing the washing-up and the ironing. It couldn't possibly be a profession.

When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.

I used to do a lot of story writing and storytelling coming up through grade school. By the time I got to college, I decided that I wanted to perform as well, and that's where I started.

It's masturbation for writers to be able to write this absolutely outrageous personality, in a character that you somehow agree with, part of the time, at least.

After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get out a new book by him each year.

There's no such thing as a short review. It will take a long time to get it started. That's the reality. And it will be probably even longer to complete it.

I like to write things to be personal, so I just put what I'm thinking about at the time.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.

I've been writing and wanting to direct for a long time.

Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.

I don't know if people realize how much I tour and how much time I spend writing, but I really enjoy it.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.

I'm most happy when I am writing at night, because I need space and time to write.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

I started writing when I was a journalist. But every time I sat down to write a novel or a story, I ended up writing about myself, which was incredibly annoying and self-involved.

It's very slow for me to create humor. It takes me a long time to write a humor piece. It takes days.

Part of the writer's task is to recognize what he's done, then dive back in and make the connections clearer. I'm a strong believer in getting things right the ninth or tenth time.

Before I got my present job, I spent many years teaching writing part-time, so-called, at community colleges and universities. It's academia's version of migrant labor.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.