Quotes About Writing

In order to write the novel I'm committed to, I have to pretend that it's not only separate from everything I've written before, but also separate from anything anyone in the history of the universe has written. This is a grotesque delusion and a crass vanity, but also a creative necessity.

It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.

The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.

Most literary people die of starvation.

I don't write under the ghost of Faulkner. I live in the same town and find his life and work inspiring, but that's it. I have a motorcycle and tool along the country lanes. I travel at my own speed.

To a writer, going on from week to week and from year to year, one of the greatest rewards lies in discovering his own inconsistency. The opinions that he expressed so confidently last year he may repudiate now by expressing view curiously different or wholly antagonistic. If such were not the case he might well be concerned about himself and ask what could be the causes that were keeping him from growth.

If you have writer's block, write about having writer's block, and you will no longer have it.

Pens are too light.Take a chisel to write.

Sentences will be consigned to museums if the emptiness in writing persists.

I had wanted to write The Possessed as fiction, but everyone told me that no one would read a novel about graduate students. It seems almost uncivilized to tell someone writing a novel, "No, you have to call this a memoir."

Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn't just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened.

I think any start has to be a false start because really there's no way to start. You just have to force yourself to sit down and turn off the quality censor. And you have to keep the censor off, or you start second-guessing every other sentence. Sometimes the suspicion of a possible false start comes through, and you have to suppress it to keep writing. But it gets more persistent. And the moment you know it's really a false start is when you start ... it's hard to put into words.

The way I write isn't visually or stylistically dependent. It's usually one character that starts talking, and that points me where the story's going.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? It's based on a novel by a man named Lear And I need a job So I wanna be a paperback writer Paperback writer

Judas, boredom is such a drag, drag, drag. Writing might be good therapy for me, though.

With me, I probably work a lot more than people assume I do, but people don't realize how much work goes into writing and producing and making a movie.

In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.

I thought Cheever was magnificent and that if I could write like him that would be the best I could do. And then I realized that what I really wanted to write had nothing to do with what he was doing.

I just wanted to write something about running, but I realized that to write about my running is to write about my writing. It's a parallel thing in me.

And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.

I had a long, long time to make 'Rubberband,' and I originally thought that that record would last two years. Once I got over realizing that that's not gonna happen, and sort of got my perspective back, I realized, 'Man I'm really fortunate. I get to write music, make music for a living.'

The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.

You have to understand the medium you're writing for. People jump into writing musicals without realizing how complicated they are. Knowing one form doesn't necessarily mean you know the other. You have to be comfortable with it.

Trump is an amazing comedy writer without realizing it.