Quotes About Writing

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

When it comes to sermon writing, generally there are two problems. Some preachers love the research stage but hate the writing, and they start writing too late. Others don't like doing research, so they move way too fast to the writing part.

There comes a point when you're writing a novel when you're in it so deep that the life of the novel becomes more real to you than life itself. You have to write your way out of it; once you're there, it's too late to abandon.

I learned this lesson too late, frankly: Do not judge it while you're doing it. Do not go back and fix things that are 20 pages ago when you're already 20 pages past that.

I write better in Cape Breton... too many people around in Ontario. Down there I meet all sorts of non-human people, but they don't bother me, and I don't feel I have to apologize on behalf of my species quite so often.

In India, too many people do not write memoirs, but Natwar Singh and P. C. Alexander did.

I think too many people edit themselves way too soon. There's plenty of time to edit, and it is a crucial part of it all, too.

I'm not sure there are too many people who write what I write.

I've got my own philosophy. People who write books have different philosophies. You read too many people and you get screwed up.

I used to have a real passion for writing, but not so much anymore - probably because I do too much of it.

I've always thought it was important not to attach too much superstition to the space where you're writing, because once you get into the mindset that you can only do it a certain way in a certain place, your creativity can get blocked.

Too much of Indian writing in English, it seemed to me, consisted of middle-class people writing about other middle-class people - and a small slice of life being passed off as an authentic portrait of the country.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

It's very easy for a writer to spend much too much time in her head.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.

I've been making notes of my life, but when it finally came time to write it, it took me back, and I cried many tears. But I also think that it's liberating.

I made my drama teacher cry. I only took drama to get out of writing papers in English and the teacher was this thespian Broadway geek and here I was this Italian guy from Staten Island and I would put her in tears.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

I took a clown class at NYU - that's where I met June Diane Raphael, my writing partner and best friend.

It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set - which was kind of shallow in my case anyway - had begun to fade.

'Goon Squad' took about three years to write and that's the short end. My second novel, 'Look at Me,' took six years.

I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.

I have always used emotion as a writing tool. That goes back to me being on the stage.