Quotes About Writing

Writing a novel is hard work but it feels great to have the printed copy in my hand. Tonight I celebrate with the Laneway Press team who have helped me so very much. Prepare for the popping of corks!

When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'll have a book.

I usually get the title for a book first, and I type it up immediately. I sit there and look at it and admire it, and I think to myself, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I'l have a book. It is such a pleasurable moment that I type many more title pages than I could ever use.

But in my experience, a writer gravitates toward a certain form or genre because, like a well-made jacket, it suits him.

I]t's the child writer who has figured out, early on, that writing is about saving your soul.

but every person who does serious time with a keyboard is attempting to translate his version of the world into words so that he might be understood.

The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.

But I also believe there is enormous value in the piece of writing that goes no further than the one person for whom it was intended, that no combination of written words is more eloquent than those exchanged in letters between lovers or friends, or along the pale blue lines of private diaries, where people take communion with themselves.

For the writer who truly loves language, a trip to the copy editor is like a week at a spa. You come out looking younger, trimmer, and standing straighter.

There comes a time when you have to let go of the New Yorker fantasy in service of justing getting on with it [writing].

There is a necessary gestation period during which a writer should protect his work, because the minute he sends it out, or joins a writing group, or enrolls in an MFA program, he engages the part of himself that is focused on the result more than the work. For

Look inside yourself and you'll find a world of things (a world of your own experiences)worth writing about.

Writing a book is like sliding down a rainbow! Marketing it is like trudging through a field of chewed bubblegum on a hot, sticky day.

Betty G. Birney

I write in longhand on yellow legal pads.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

Hey, Holly, Well, how do you feel about writing to a bald guy? Seriously, I did it. I shaved my head! Most all the guys in Mr. Fremont's class did, too. It's weird what some people will do to encourage a friend.

Yaz? kendini söyler, söylemedi?ini yok eder. Bir de, ara bir yol olarak, yok ettiklerinin bir bölü?ünü sezdirebilir. Sezdirdikleri "var" de?ildir ama "yok" da de?ildir.

The writer's life: Hard days, lots of work, no money, too much silence. Nobody's fault. You chose it.

I think it would be fun to write about movies again.

I had a couple of movies that I was passionately involved with that I could never get made. 'Richard Pryor ' I wrote for - gosh - over a year. That was close to getting made for two-and-a-half years after that. We're still pushing it, you know. It is weird. Suddenly you wake up and it's like, 'God, five years have gone by.'

No, 'F/X 2' was a job. I enjoyed doing it but that was definitely a job. I wrote that, I didn't direct it but 'Candyman' and the earlier horror movies I made, I was completely into horror and suspense and always have been. It's informed everything I've done, even the way scenes are shot in 'Kinsey and 'Gods and Monsters.'

No piece of writing is ever finished. It's just due.