Quotes About Writing

All my works over the years have been autobiographical in the sense they reflect some part of my life, although I have fictionalised them to an extent.

'Shadow and Bone' was my first book, and I think I was unconsciously echoing a lot of the fantasy that I had grown up with, which sets a kind of default for straight white characters. And that's something I've tried to improve on as I write, to write more authentically and reflect the people around me in the world, around me more realistically.

I like to write, I like to reflect, and not just poetry, I like to write my thoughts down. I think it's good for people who are more introspective, and it helps me get a better understanding of myself.

I write my films with Reema Kagti, and I think all the characters that I have written, somewhere or the other, reflect my thoughts, ideology and morality.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

On 'Half Nelson,' I was credited as the director, we both co-wrote it and Anna was the producer. We didn't know too many directing teams working at the time except the Coen brothers and that seemed to be the model, and people always know that they're a team, whether the credit reflected that or not.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me. When I hit 50, I added five more lessons and the paper ran the column again.

I think characters are going to be, if not a reflection of the author, at least some refraction of some part of their personality.

Writers want to be reread. They want to think that their words don't just flash by but deserve some reflection.

You need to recognize that the copyright date on a book reflects when it came out, not when it was written - assume that the information in the book is at least a year older than the copyright date, and possibly two.

Good writers know that crime is an entre into telling a greater story about character. Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

Good crime writing holds up a mirror to the readers and reflects in a darker light the world in which they live.

I try to be a friend to my boys just the way my dad was with me. Subconsciously that reflects in my writing.

Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything.

I don't often reread my own books, unless I am going into another in the series and need to refresh my mood when originating the concept.

It was very hard for me to put my life on paper. It was a very intimate process, very psychological, but at the same time liberating. It was like cleaning the closet, like cleaning the house... It was very refreshing.

Writing 'Rainwater' was a refreshing change of pace... a change of everything, in fact.

I first started writing historical fiction in the late '70s and kept pictures of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers on my refrigerator until my first book was published by Avon in 1982. The biggest advantage of this genre for me is that it allows me to blend fact and fiction.

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

Now I am a writer who can command fairly good payments from magazines with large circulations, I very often refuse to write for them and still write sometimes for small magazines for nothing.

I'm not a writer who refuses to talk about a book until I've finished.

I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don't think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean, I can hang on to a sentence for several years and then put it into a book that's completely different from the one it started in.