Quotes About Writing

I spent my life on the road touring, and a lot of the songs are written in tour buses and hotel rooms.

People wanted to know where I was and what I was doing. Was I still recording? Was I touring? Was I putting a band together? Was I writing songs? Was I even still singing?

Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.

For years I've wanted to write about the Australian countryside, but, like most Australians, I've only got a tourist's knowledge of it. I thought that if I disobeyed that basic rule of writing - write about what you know - I'd write a thin and inauthentic book.

I write in the mornings, two or three hours every day, and then at least four times a week I play in a duplicate game at a bridge club. I try to go to tournaments three, four, or five times a year.

If it weren't for book tours, I would never leave my house.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

I think I have sort of gravitated toward issues that I don't know the answers to, because that's what's more interesting for me to write.

Anyone who's read my 'Terror in the Skies' series knows that I have not been writing with an eye toward approval from any government agency.

I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.

It's not surprising to see in my own work, looking back, and in the work of some of my peers, an attention to family. It's nice to write a book that does tend toward significance and meaning, and where else are you sure of finding it?

No one was going to stop me from writing and no one had to really guide me towards science fiction. It was natural, really, that I would take that interest.

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

I certainly was an actor and then I drifted more towards writing and directing.

Only towards the end of this process are any of the chapters in fully readable condition, a state of affairs that used to alarm my wife. But Joan's got used to it.

I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors.

Writers of historical fiction are often faced with a problem: if they include real-life people, how do they ensure that their make-believe world isn't dwarfed by truth? The question loomed large as I began reading 'The Black Tower', Louis Bayard's third foray into historical fiction and fifth novel overall.

I wrote 'Time of the Dark' in 1978 and 'The Silent Tower' in 1984, so the thing that sticks out for me is how totally technology has changed. I suppose that's the great peril for real-world crossovers.

I am not going to write 'Fifty Shades of Royal Purple.' Well I could, but I would be put in a beautifully decorated - that having been my profession before - room in the Tower.

If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it, write in scenes with dialogue. Somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinions.

It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.

Authors all have at least one thing in common, which is that when we finally get finished copies of our books, we get giddy as kindergartners. We touch them constantly, and build towers with them, and take pictures of our cats and dogs reading them.

And I don't think I'm giving away any secrets here, but there are a lot of terrible scripts in this town.

I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.