Quotes About Writing

My agent, Jeff Andrews, suggested I write a book. For some reason. he doesn't like it when I'm not doing anything.

I absolutely don't write for women - far, far from it. It's so not what I want to do. Some of the writers, who have helped out at the beginning and end of the process - they're all men - have suggested quite feminine subjects they want me to explore. And I'm always, simply, 'No.' I don't want to do diets, don't want to. I just can't do it.

One of my graduate school professors, to whom I started sending poems when I started writing again after a 10-year hiatus, suggested I prepare a book manuscript which he could send to publishers for me.

I didn't know anything about romance novels until a friend suggested that I try writing one. After I read a few, I realized that my favorite part of fiction had always been the relationship aspect.

A publisher friend of mine suggested that I write a book about my grandfather, who had just died. I had nothing else to fill my empty days with, so I started work on this book. While researching it - watching lots of movies, talking to moviemakers - I became interested in movies and started making documentaries.

Originally I was going to write a fashion style guide, but then my publishers suggested I write a novel instead.

Parents, it seems, have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.

Look, I'd take a suggestion from my grandmother if I thought it would improve a film I was writing.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

I didn't go to law school to become a lawyer, per se - let's just say I was leaning in to some strong suggestions from my parents - but my nebulous goals of someday becoming a writer were just that, nebulous.

I'm an author who likes assignments, who needs suggestions, ideas I would never have thought of otherwise - then something happens inside my alien head. Other people have to decide whether or not I'm a good writer, but I do have the ability to write in different styles.

I used to work for a non-profit organization where I worked as a mentor and a counselor to first-generation college student and they kept asking me 'What can I read to try to know what I'm about to be in for,' and while I did have some good suggestions, I figured... I don't know that that book is out there, and that's sort of why I had to write it.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose - that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle.

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.

The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.

Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?

I've been doing some acting, writing classes, and taking a holistic approach so I can actually be good at this craft. But ideally I'd eventually want to get my own show and make my 'Atlanta' or my 'Master of None' - whatever that would look like - in whatever media landscape that would best suit it.

I've never written specifically for children as such. I write to please myself, and if it is suitable, it gets printed as a children's book.

My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

If I set out to write 'War And Peace' or 'A Suitable Boy,' I'd be miserable.

The Pacific Northwest, and particularly Whidbey Island, is extremely suited to be a location in a novel.

For a while, when I got out of college, I tried to write fiction. I'd grown up more around novelists, and my initial attraction was to write fiction. But I was much less suited for it. I always struggled to figure out what people were saying or doing in a particular moment.