Quotes About Writing

They may not spell brilliantly, they may not have the most amazing command of the English language. But they are willing to learn, and they read like crazy. They write, because they have loved so much to read.

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.

writers who want to survive in 2015 will need to make money off of free books, or they will soon quit writing.

If you can avoid the grammatical bog of trying to wow English professors with your sentences, then you're well on your way to getting the reader to turn one page and then the next.

Ly" adverbs slow down the sentence and often foil the writer's intent.

You must be true to yourself—however, if you have a dozen editors tell you that something is a cliché, trite, or overdone, it probably is, and you need to step back and take a look at your work.

Anyone using two or more exclamation points together will not only be rejected but taken out and shot!!!

People write programs. That statement is worth pausing over. People write programs. Despite the field's infatuation with metaphors like architecture and bridge-building and its dabbling in alternative models from biology or physics, the act of programming today remains an act of writing—of typing character after character, word after word, line after line.

You have an honest way of writing, especially your first book. It's genuine. That may not seem like the most thrilling compliment, but a voice like yours—a real voice—is rare these days.

When I was younger I wanted to be a big movie star who'd get to be funny on talk shows and then I wanted to retire and write science fiction.

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I'll dig with it.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

So you drive on to the frontier of writing where it happens again.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

A writer strives to express a universal truth in the way that rings the most bells in the shortest amount of time.

Writing every day across nine time zones because Gillian [Grassie] was in Berlin, and we were working together via Skype. It was pretty intense. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing -- and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga -- it will all equal itself out.

Style is the thing that's always a bit phony, and at the same time you cannot write without style.

It took me years to learn to sit at my desk for more than two minutes at a time, to put up with the solitude and the terror of failure, and the godawful silence and the white paper.

Instead of writing it wrong six times and then writing it right, I think it wrong six times and then write it right the seventh time.

I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.