Quotes About Writing

Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.

As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience.

Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits.

I try to think of it not as writer's block, but a time where you just need to live life and experience things so you have something to write about.

My relatives used to laugh when I talked of being a writer.

I don't read my own books, but sometimes if there is a new edition I open it and then I feel this life of a writer was not so hopeless, not so bad.

I still always think the greatest moment for me, as a writer, is when I press that button and send the first draft of the script.

I never get writer's block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.

As a writer, a blank page will humble the hell out of you. It always does, and it always will.

I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way - one solid scene doesn't have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.

I am a writer who happens to use some tools of journalism.

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.

If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.

I wasn't predicted to be anything. I just followed an inner spirit, and it put me in the right place and the right time. I didn't want to be the mayor of Atlanta. I didn't want to run for Congress. I didn't want to work for Martin Luther King Jr. I wanted to work close to him and be a writer and write about the movement.

I think that, as a writer, while it's your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

To begin impatiently is the worst mistake a writer can make.

I mean, the problem is, I think I'm a great writer.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I'm not good at narrative; I'm really a gag writer, and that comes from being in the newspaper comic strip world for a while in college. What I do is I just write tons of jokes, then I sort them out in terms of quality and then pick the best of the jokes and then try to form them into a plot. If I get a good theme going, I feel lucky.

As a writer, I always think about who my prototype actors are, in my brain. It's helpful, as a writer, to think about that.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

My dad is a writer, and to see him always in front of a typewriter gave me the inspiration to write. He was my idol, my hero. I wanted to be just like him.

The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn't be a cop anymore.