Quotes About Writing

I like myself better when I'm writing regularly.

Since I'm a fan of collections and anthologies, believe that the best writing often shines in shards and galloping stretches, I never find myself lobbying for a writer I enjoy reading regularly to hole up in Heidegger's hut for four or five years to bring forth a mountain.

Putting words on paper regularly is part of the necessary discipline of writing. A journal is a great way to do that.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

Let's face it - online promotion of your books could easily become a full-time career if you're not careful. But if you're not writing regularly, then it won't be long before there's nothing to promote.

I started writing regularly for 'The Atlantic' roughly around the time that Barack Obama got inaugurated.

Writing is a side hustle that had previously enabled me to pay for rehab for my brother, purchase a car for my parents, and help friends out when they fell on hard times.

I write in the booth and memorize in rehearsals.

It wasn't until high school that I actually started writing. I was in a lot of the school plays and musicals, and there was a lot of down time during rehearsals. I would go into the orchestra pit and mess around on the grand piano.

Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.

My current project is my band, Population 1. We are writing, rehearsing and playing in Los Angeles.

I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms.

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

Having 'The Expats' not be 'wholesale-y' rejected by the world made it possible for me to write the second book and have a publisher buy it before it was entirely written. And it made it easier for me and my publisher to get 'The Accident' out into the world without trying to convince people to pay attention to it the way you do for a first novel.

When I wrote my first book, 'Koolaids,' I felt rejected and not wanted.

I kept sending out stories and getting rejected.

I decided to write short stories because they got rejected quicker.

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.

The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.

Eudora Welty's 'A Curtain of Green' had an enormous effect on me. But my early attempts to graft stories from the Deep South onto North of England provincialism were not successful. All were rejected.

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.

I have been rejected 120 times, probably because I didn't write the right book.

After 20 years, a million written words, and nine rejected novels, I finally landed a book contract.

After being rejected for years, I found a publisher for 'Keeper,' and it won prizes, and then I had to write a second and a third book because I kept taking the money and spending it.