Quotes About Writing

All the stories in 'The UnAmericans' required interviews, travel, hours and hours in the archives. All of that stuff is so important in the beginning, but I reach a point where I have to shuck it away.

The discipline required for athletics carried through to writing. You call it obsession. I call it discipline. By the way, I see nothing wrong with that.

Quite a lot is required of writers these days in terms of, if not promoting the work, then being a representative of the work. It's a difficult thing, really.

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.

The day an actor is not required, the day no one is writing for you, is when you're actually dead... That's a very scary moment.

The first and primary requirement for me in a director that I'd want to work with is: do they love writing, and do they love the collaboration process with writers?

Giving oneself permission to write to begin with is the first enormous challenge. But you discover that this permission involves a requirement: To write about things that are difficult because they are, in fact, your subject.

Over the years, my students influenced me greatly, and I've learned many lessons from them. I have an immense amount of respect for them, and I think that respect for your audience is the foremost requirement for anyone who wants to write.

Of course, to publish something, you have to write it, polish it, then hire out the line editing, copy editing and cover design. After which, you pick your way through the minefield of conforming to the differing requirements of Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords, or hire someone to do it for you.

It's an extension of what I do also as part of making my living - I go into schools and work with kids on writing, and I do assembly programs often. Each one is different because each school has different requirements.

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

Good writing of course requires talent, and no one can teach you to have talent.

I've often been accused of making anthropology into literature, but anthropology is also field research. Writing is central to it.

I enjoy doing the research of nonfiction; that gives me some pleasure, being a detective again.

I'm publicizing the book that's done. I'm writing the book that's in the hopper, and I'm doing a little advance research on the book to come.

I use the city because it saves time, I don't have to do a lot of research on the setting.

The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

If I get blocked, it is generally because I don't know enough about some aspect of the story or the characters. The answer for this is generally more research, or making more background notes, so the place and person can be more fully realized inside my own mind.

When I'm not writing, I do a lot of research reading on the shape of civilization. Fiction can be a lot of different things... but I feel like it's my job to write about the way things are.

Research to me is as important or more important than the writing. It is the foundation upon which the book is built.

Everything I know, I write about. My only research is what I did.

See, I have no journalism in my background, so I wasn't practised at research or writing non-fiction, nor at handling the truth in a journalistic way. Journalists know when to call a halt and write something, but I kept on looking for answers.

I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.