Quotes About Writing

If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft - he must first have been given some hope.

When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.

Neal Stephenson handles exposition better than anybody else. I keep trying to learn his tricks, but every time I duck into his pages, I get lost in the stories all over again and forget that I'm a writer.

In the past, a writer had to go outside and get to know others before learning about their work, but the Internet has made humanity more accessible for misanthropes like me. I read blogs, tweets, Facebook posts and Reddit threads where people detail their jobs.

I think the last thing you want to do as a writer, as a storyteller, is to create indifference. I don't necessarily go out of my way to provoke, but I would much rather have a song that triggers a whole myriad of reactions than a song that inspires a shrug of the shoulder.

It takes some courage to write fiction about politically controversial topics. The dread is you'll be labeled a political writer.

For the vast majority of my adult life, I was a freelance writer, forever scrambling for work that paid an insulting non-amount.

There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.

The joy for me as a writer is that, despite the fact I spend most of my life on my own in a room eating too much chocolate and drinking too much tea, eventually they let me out into the world.

It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

One of the ironies of being a professional writer is that, if you are even moderately successful, the very traits that let you succeed as a writer are not much help when the time comes to head out as 'The Author.'

That is the thing about being a writer; your subject matter may not stay your subject matter if you break their trust by revealing personal and editorialized information about them.

There is an invisible aspect of being a writer; none of it is about you. It's about your work, and that's what it should be.

I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.

Just being able to get paid to do something you love is a wonderful thing. That said, a writer's daily routine, unless you're Dominick Dunne, isn't exactly glamorous. Much of it amounts to drudgery, staring at a computer screen all day in a room by yourself, juggling nouns and verbs to make a demanding editor happy.

The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.

If I weren't a writer, I'd be a psychiatrist.

I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

I've basically worked as a journalist and a writer.

I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'

You know what I loved about 'Sideways'? Well, the wine, of course. But it was one of the few movies in which being a writer was realistically depicted. I loved how the Paul Giamatti character tries so ineptly to talk about his book.

Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer.