Quotes About Writing

To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper.

I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes.

It's been a great place to get in touch with what people are really thinking. And to make contact with readers and other writers. Egalitarian, wide open, like the Wild West!

Pick up any newspaper in the morning. Count the words in the lead sentences. There will be at least 25 in all of them: Guaranteed. The writers just want to tell you how many degrees they have from this college or that university.

For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable.

I think it's our job as writers for Marvel Comics to continue to create those type of stories that can be mined instead of just trying to give readers exactly what they see on film.

I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much.

It feels as though a very disproportionate number of main characters are writers, because that's what the writer knows. Fair enough. But nothing bothers me more in a movie than an actor playing a writer, and you just know he's not a writer. Writers recognize other writers. Ethan Hawke is too hot to be a writer.

I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view. It's informed by our own understanding of spirituality; things that matter, things that are important to us. I write about things that matter for me.

Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.

Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate.

I've lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won't get a book written. You've got to write.

I was very pleased, obviously, to have outsold such great writers. But I'm not insane - I do realize that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.

I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that. I didn't know what else to do about it except write about it.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite.

Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.