Quotes About Writing

Writing 'Animal Talk' column in MetroPlus gave me immense satisfaction. I quite enjoyed writing the column.

It took me a long time to know enough about writing to really write short stories. You can't just immerse yourself, as you do in a novel, and see where everything goes. Novels are a very flexible, accommodating form. Short stories aren't.

I'm an immigrant and I've always wanted to write something about America.

It's what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.

When I did 'Immunity,' even though I did a film score at the beginning and also at the end, I was left uninterrupted during the middle bit. I got a good year of just writing and focusing. That, to me, is when I make the best stuff.

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched, because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.

When you write for kids, people always ask you what lesson you mean to impart. I don't think adult writers get that question. I never mean to teach anybody a lesson, because I don't know anything myself.

Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.

Donna Tartt blows me away - that impeccable writing, so rich you could eat it and so luminous that it lights up the whole room, and the way she brings her characters to life so completely and in such fine detail that you know them as intimately as your dearest friends.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

Having a facility for language is an important part of being an author.

It's hard to be in the limelight and write songs that cater to fans that have expectations of you. We just want to write songs that we love, but all the different people with different ideas coming in make it difficult. We have to ask ourselves if we're writing for the most important people: the fans.

The important thing in writing is the capacity to astonish. Not shock - shock is a worn-out word - but astonish.

I'm not one of those true writers who can't bear not to be writing. Yet it's one of the most important things in my life.

It took me a good two-and-a-half to three years to write 'Dhobi Ghat' and more importantly be satisfied with it.

One gets the impression that this is how Ernest Hemingway would have written had he gone to Vassar.

I always have the impression that I write the same book.

My background is in improv and writing.

I was never that good on stage with live improv. I was much better on film or writing something and then thinking about it. I was too in my head when I was on stage.

As a writer, I use improv to write. Exploring characters and stories through improv and sitting at the computer and thinking about what this character would say or do helps me creatively.

Many writers are afraid of writing something bad, so they don't try or give up when their efforts don't lead to a masterpiece right away. If you work at it, you will improve.

When you are reading, someone has done a lot of work on your behalf, someone has had ideas and has then written and corrected and improved them so that they can be shared.

It's easy to get discouraged; just keep writing because you love to do it, and you'll keep improving.

When you're writing, you're putting thought into what you want to express, and then you come up with it - it comes to you. When you're improvising, it's the same thing. You're writing. You just say it out loud right then, instead of saying, 'You think this might work?'