Quotes About Writing

Writing is a very strenuous thing - it's like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer's room.

For me, my writing benefits from my experience.

Besides acting, writing has been my passion for a long time.

There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part.

Just writing a lot doesn't necessarily make you a better writer. You have to hear yourself as a writer, and the best way to do that is to read your writing out loud.

The best way to get me to write more books is to read the ones that exist!

I've written the best work I know how. And I'm appreciative of the people who read it and care about the work - and that's pretty much the end of that.

The important thing is to write when your brain is at its best. Work edits or do outside reading with the rest of the day.

I try not to think about writers who came before me when I'm writing myself. If I did, given the abundance of literary talent Scotland - and Edinburgh in particular - has bestowed upon the world, I wouldn't be able to get as much as a sentence written.

There's no better way to process pain than to write.

I think we're so often, as writers, afraid of writing something that is less than perfect, and that fear paralyzes us. I'm a big fan of writing less than perfect things.

I was always told you're not going to make much money from writing. You can actually do it. Now I've built a really good, big house out of words.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

My scepticism of biography continues even though I keep doing it.

In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.

The truth is, I do some of my best writing at 3 A.M. while blasting 'Every Time I Die' into my ear drums.

I ask God to bless me and I keep writing this beautiful story in football.

I think I was blessed with this talent for a reason. No one told me how to write a song, but I'm just good at it, you know. There are a lot of other things in my life that I'm not so good at, but writing a song is not one of them.

I don't believe in writer's block.

We can put fear of the future in front of us to block us, or behind us to drive us forward. I feel like telling all the people who look like me to start trying to write. You don't know it's possible because it's not often in front of you.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.