Quotes About Writing

Writing is mentally stimulating; it's like a puzzle that makes you think all the time.

You should spend more time with your families; write that novel you've always wanted to write. You know, the one about the fearless reporter who stands up to the administration. You know - fiction.

Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again.

I identify with the characters very closely. At the same time that I'm outside, writing, I'm also inside, experiencing, and it can be very unsettling.

I wanted to write a balls-to-the-wall supernatural horror story, something I haven't done in a long time.

I've lost my writing skills since college. I couldn't write a book. It would take a long time.

I can always make things longer than I intend for them to be, but cutting things down is just brutal. It's like cutting off your fingers every time you lose a word.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

If bad taste were a felony, every writer I know would've done prison time.

I teach classes 28 weeks of the year, but the rest of the time I do research and write books.

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

I'm such a history-nerd that, with time for research, I could probably enjoy writing in just about any time period.

Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it's worth knowing about them. That's challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.

Every time I'm not on a project, I'm writing or in the studio or doing gigs DJing.

Most of the time, songs that I write end up being finished in 30 minutes or less.

The challenge of nonfiction is keeping the attention of a reader over span of time, and to keep the quality of the writing as high as it needs to be to keep people's attention.

I'm always amazed by writers who say, "Oh you know I had a half hour so I sat down and wrote a little bit." I just need a real big chunk of time to sit down and focus. That's my process.

I love working with actors. If you cast the right person in the right part at the right time, they make you look like a better writer and director than you really are.

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.

I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.

I don't think I would do better books if I wrote full time. I write for amateurish reasons.

I have always hated flying. I mainly pass the time writing letters. I am very old school and I still keep many correspondences the old-fashioned way, via post.

When I'm about to start writing, I pull up some of my all-time-favorite re-reads to feel inspired and fall headfirst into the world of beautiful words.