Quotes About Writing

I'm fortunate in having journalism as a sideline to pay the bills, and I essentially do it in order to take as long as I want with books.

I think you end up writing things you like. I like seeing actors playing two different parts at the same time. I think it's interesting. It kind of shows you two sides of a person.

There'd be days I was in the locker room with my dad doing media, and there'd be other days that I'd be with my mom in the press box and just kind of looking at stuff from that point of view. I'd see guys writing stories after the game and stuff like that. So it was cool to me to see both sides.

I don't feel real confident expressing myself except when I'm writing. I feel kind of scatterbrained. I can see everything from both sides and that makes it hard to reach conclusions. Writing enables me to clarify things.

My personality has two sides: a very social side and a reclusive side. I love writing fiction, although I can't imagine ever being locked up in a room writing all the time.

In the hands of good writers, you have the opportunity to present both sides of an opinion equally and that you leave it to the audience to listen and then make up their own minds.

There is an extensive body of writing from both sides of the political aisle that has analyzed the extraordinary depths of hatred leveled at former President George W. Bush.

I should probably be careful admitting this, but sometimes, when my characters are having a disagreement, it's a disagreement I'm having with myself. I can see both sides of the argument.

It felt like dancing was my only way of expressing myself until I got into writing, and then I realized that there were two sides of my brain that I needed to work all the time.

The best of all kinds of movies are character-driven, and I definitely don't want to lose sight of why Derek and I started to write movies together in the first place.

When I read a book I liked, I would get a pen and one of my father's legal pads and rewrite it from memory as if I had thought of it myself. It was a clear sign that I wanted to be involved in writing, even if it was just pretend at that point.

I don't sign contracts for my books.

When I look at a lot of older stuff that I've written, I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

In my office I have a sign that says, 'Don't think. Just write!' and that's how I work. I try not to worry about each word, or even each sentence or paragraph. For me, stories evolve. Writing is a process. I rewrite each sentence, each manuscript, many times.

Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

I have finally perfected my signature. It took hours of practicing... I decided early on just to write Pippa, not Middleton.

Some people are just so happy to get published to, they sign anything. Next thing you know, they've signed over the rights to their book.

When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I knew how to do it.

I don't want to overplay the diary's significance, but it's a really helpful batting aid. It's not an obsession because I don't spend more than 10 or 20 minutes writing a day - and not necessarily every day. I might write in it three days in a row and then not the next four. It depends on the situation.

Most everything that happens to me in any significant sense finds its way into my fiction.

It's usually easier for me to begin writing in a character's voice if that person is different from me in some significant way.

If you go all the way back, I've always written science-fiction, I've always written fantasy, I've always written horror stories and monster stories, right from the beginning of my career. I've always moved back and forth between the genres. I don't really recognise that there's a significant difference between them in some senses.

I write about my life, choosing incidents that I think will be, for one reason or another, significant to people. Often because they may have experienced the same things.