Quotes About Writing

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text.

Here we write well when we expose frauds and hypocrites. We are great at counting warts and blemishes and weighting feet of clay. In expressing love, we belong among the underdeveloped countries.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

being published' is not the same as being a real writer.

Can it be that you don't want to go strolling with your friend in the daytime under cherry trees just coming into bloom, and in the evening listen to Schubert's music? Can it be that you won't like writing with a goose

It's not the fear of writing that blocks people, it's the fear of not writing well; something quite different.

You need to have strong faith in the next draft, that you will be a little smarter and wiser by the time this draft is finished and your only responsibility is to get there. In a way, the draft you write now is a gift to the future version of you.

2. Write a launch announcement and a support page.

Yes, Ray Bradbury did write 25,000 words of Fahrenheit 451 in just a few days. But what's often not told about that amazing burst of productivity is that he later revised the book several times over the course of a year, expanding its length and heavily editing it, before it reached its final published form. In every legendary story of bursts of creativity there is a dance somewhere if you look carefully.

Bukowski was wrong. these words don't matter. you pound them out and send them off and they're gone just like that and all you're left with is a blank screen staring you in the face.

spent some time gittin juiced on the junk you know and the poems would come thick and black, coffeelike, a little bitter you know and when the pores started jiving and all it'd be time to git on down and groove, let the words flow forth, try not to suffocate, live one more day.

Sure, I've written about women and sex and madhouses, just like Bukowski did, but I've also written about many other topics, often utilizing other stylistic methods in doing so. Bukowski would probably have been annoyed with the rambling tone of my poems in Cells.

The reason I started writing movies was because I kept getting parts that I just kind of stepped into. I didn't have to do a lot of work and I ended up getting sort of bored.

Indeed, when you write, the point isn't to make your reader understand. The point is to make him or her feel.

Perhaps the most simple, and effective, way to initially judge a piece of writing is to ask yourself: is this something I wish I had done myself, or am I glad I didn't?

Adopting tricks of the trade from colleagues is done everywhere else in research-why not in writing?

Why are you always so averse to fiction, when we've made it our meal ticket?

If you just write the kinds of stories you think others will want to read, you'll be competing with cartoonists who are far more enthusiastic for that kind of comic than you are, and they'll kick your ass every time.

You have to really dislike someone to impose a sentence of involuntary and uncompensated writing on them.

Hmm. You know, nobody gives me the time, either. I have to make the time, set priorities, discipline myself to get my writing done each day, no matter how tired I am. I worked a full-time regular job while I wrote my first novels, scraping out an hour here or there in evenings and weekends. That's how I've become a successful author.

sometimes we love what we wrote, critics hate it. Sometimes we hate what we wrote, critics love it.

the idea of being a "published" author is an antiquated and virtually meaningless one.

Heather Graham was raising children while making the time to write what has now become 100 novels.

Settle in your mind what you want, what your goal is with your writing, and then take steps to reach that goal.