Quotes About Writing

It's amazing, if you know what you want to say, how fast it is to write.

The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

I just write when the bell rings. I don't have time to wait for inspiration.

I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter - nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened.

I've never had a divorce, but I've seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can't write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I'm able to kind of express it, or their joy.

I write because it's my way of finding cool ideas, thinking through hard problems and things I don't understand, and getting better at something.

When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book.

I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.

I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page. Some people write for the page, and that's a whole other thing. I'm going for what it sounds like right away, so it may not even look good on the page.

The people I write are real to me, and basically, they tell me about their environments on a need-to-know basis.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

Certain songs by hearing the rhythm, it tells you that is either a love song or you might be heartbroken or the songs give you the vibes and you just know that certain songs are militant that you have to write.

I don't think it is an easy thing to write and expect to be commercial, even if you are from Venus and a hermaphrodite.

If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.

I like to write in coffee shops in countries in which languages I do not speak are spoken. That way, you're surrounded by the buzz of humanity, but you aren't distracted by people's conversations.

I don't write books inadvertently.

If you're going to write, then write a novel with a Haitian woman in it and try and describe her accurately. When you can do that, you can write about people.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

Write every day even if it is just a paragraph.

Forget being 'discovered.' All you can do is write. If you write well enough, and are stubborn enough to embrace failure, and if you happen to fall into the narrow categories that the book market recognizes, then you might make a little money. Otherwise, it's a struggle. A gorgeous struggle.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

I always used to look at books and wonder how anybody could come up with so many words. But my divorce and then falling in love with somebody else has released in me an ability to write in other ways apart from songs.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.