Quotes About Writing

I write all the time but often abandon things I don't think will go anywhere. It's rare that I'll labor over writing something that doesn't feel like it will turn into a keeper.

I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop.

In my spare time, I paint, garden, hike and enjoy massages for my weary writer's back.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

Most of the time, writing is a lot of fun, and not a small amount of self-medication.

I think a lot, so I don't spend a lot of time actually writing - I do that part very quickly. That helps, for me. To keep track of the characters.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

I've written something and I would like to have my first film directed by the time I'm 30.

When Im writing, I spend all my time in The Grocer on Elgin buying ready-made meals; I think they are the only reason my husband and kids havent left me.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

I was a 'learn by doing' writer - I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.

Each time, I think I'm never going to write another book. It never gets easier.

I wrote all the time, but the idea of doing it professionally seemed like pie in the sky. Who gets paid to write? I grew up in Pittsburgh, so it wasn't really a notion that a lot of people pursue.

I just can't write and listen to music at the same time.

I actually can't listen to music and write poetry at the same time, but I do kind of think about the music I've been listening to when I write.

Nobody has time to write a book. Some people just do it anyhow.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

I couldn't understand why my productivity went down when I had deliberately made more time available to write. Then I realized it was because I wasn't flying as much.

Yes. I am writing full-time. Which is strange. It feels like not having a job.

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

I've never written a children's book, but when people meet me for the first time and I say I write books, they invariably reply, 'Children's books?' Maybe it's something about my face.

I'd read Up in the Old Hotel, and I wanted to do something with Mitchell's stuff for a long time.