Quotes About Writing

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say.

And suddenly I see I do write poems in sentences—not broken into lines, but wound around the caesura, making a caduceus.

A week later, I said to a friend: I don't think I could ever write about it. Maybe in a year I could write something. There is something in me maybe someday to be written; now it is folded, and folded, and folded, like a note in school.

If I had to see my face while I am writing this, I would not write it. When I was a child, I was encouraged to speak from behind a tree as if I were the tree, or speak as if up from out of the ground, or, as a white adult, to speak out from within a white adult—how easy that has made my life is almost invisible to me.

Being a professional writer is a lot like being a hooker. You'd better find out if you're any good at it before you start charging for it.

When I got older, I still thought I could write life. I didn't understand, as my mother had just realized that evening, that it is the other way around. And yet, here I am, still trying.

There was power in the pen, I knew this for certain...It was there all the time, just waiting for me.

Why would anyone write about illness except the ill? And at first, too, the experience is too close for the ill person to be a reliable witness. The mind doesn't want to write about the body's condition but to change it, for in dreams the body can still dance!

I can't write myself except through reading others' words.

Perhaps I can carry my home on my back, if home is nothing but this cocoon, in which I can write and feel fine.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.

Writing doesn't leave much time for hobbies, unless you consider that I began writing as a hobby and have made the hobby into a profession.

Working on the plot/story idea for my next novel ... It always takes time.

The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

I read all the time. Sometimes I get asked if I've thought about writing a novel.

If I have to write on an airplane or get up early to write or write late, you just gotta sit down. When you have the time, you have to be able to do it.

I got a call from an agent to come to New York City, and write for the 'Ford Star Revue.' Because at the time there wasn't much 'national television'.