Quotes About Writing

There are always things I find difficult - being in crowds, remembering faces. I do like routines. I always travel with someone. My life in Avignon is a very quiet one. I have an apartment that looks over the whole city. I can drop into town, but a lot of the time I write from home. In some respects I still live a very quiet, simple life.

I started writing short stories. I tried writing horror, mystery, science fiction. I joined a little critique group here in town and ran my stories past them. After about three years, I tackled my first novel, Subterranean. It took me 11 months to write.

I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.

The fun of writing established characters is that there's a rich mythology to draw from - you get to play with toys you loved as a kid.

I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.

I've been writing American history for a long time, and I've had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they're hard to write about because they don't leave much of a historical trace, and they're not usually involved in high-profile public events.

I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track.

I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track. But yes, I don't like to get Maudlin. And I have a tendency towards it.

A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

I think writing novels has taught me more about the value of patience and being organized. I've learned to use timelines and wikis to track decisions and make sure everything still fits together. It's both easier and harder than writing short fiction.

I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

I'm not an investigative journalist; I don't track crime or police blotters.

This experience of getting so lost in my writing that I lose track of time, or of anything outside the imagined world, is a release for me.

'Library of Souls' is longer than 'Hollow City' by a considerable margin, but this time I was on the right track from the beginning, so I never had to start over. It took about 15 months, all told.

Because I've a track record of talking about books I never write, in Australia they think I'm about to write a book about Jane Austen. Something I said at some festival.

I have a 10-year track record of writing for the Jewish community.

The royalty any author gets is dependent on his track record and marketability and often on the price of his book, too. The higher you price a book, the more comfortable your publisher will be in paying you a higher royalty.

I started writing rhymes first and then put it to the music. I figured out I could lock it to the beat better if I heard the music first. I like to get a lot of tracks, put the track up and let the music talk to me about what it's about.

In terms of writing more club tracks, writing more electronically influenced - I feel like it was all electronically influenced, but now that influence has come to me in a different way.

It's been neat to find out different writing strategies. I've been in the room with so many different writers. Sometimes, you write with tracks, and other times, with acoustic guitars. That's been really a cool thing, because it brings out different lyrics with you.

I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.

Writers displace their anxiety on to the tools of the trade. It's better to say that you haven't got the right pencil than to say you can't write, or to blame your computer for losing your chapter than face up to your feeling that it's better lost.

It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.