Quotes About Writing

I'm not spitting in my own soup, I love having spent my life thinking about these things-but you don't have to know anything about his life, even though I've just written a biography!

Keeping a journal is the number-one best way to develop your written voice.

I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.

I've written six seasons of a TV show with great help from an incredible staff of writers and other collaborators, but I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing. I've kind of freed myself of the expectation that I ever will.

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.

Stage is so important because it teaches me how to convey character with words - how to convey how a character reacts by the way they appear on stage. I can usually tell a playwright from someone who has never written for the stage. Did the character work? Did the dialogue reveal who the character is?

Had we settled in Pennsylvania, there's no way I would have written a Confederate novel.

In school, my favourite class was when we were given a subject for an essay on which we could freewheel. And poetry: I've always written it and loved the way words interact, in meaning and in sound.

I've had songs that were spread out over a number of years, and I've written some in ten minutes, and everything in between.

Lots of people want to have written; they don't want to write. In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of a job, not at the beginning.

I have written 20 books, and each one is like having a baby. Writing is not easy; some people want to write books but just can't put a story together. I can put together a story that interests both me and my readers.

Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access.

And I admit it: there's a rather dirty thrill when 700 people laugh at a joke you've written.

When I'm writing, it's because I'm trying to figure something out for myself. If I don't believe in what I've written, then how can I expect anyone else to believe in that, either?

Reading is an exercise for learning how to write and vice versa. I have read myself into being a Christian, but I have also written myself into being a Christian.

Generations of thinkers have made typewriters their frenemies, and long before there were Gmail inboxes, print correspondence stacked up, some hastily written and impulsive on the steel gadgets.

I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.

More modern poetry is written than read.

I have written about the women around me. My ancestors, my relatives, lovers. It was a way of trying to make it all make sense.

We tend to read each other's books in sizeable chunks as they are written. I don't know that you could say we are ruthless with each other - in fact, I suppose we are very kind. There are ways to make suggestions which are not destructive.

'Presumed Innocent' was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished novels by then... as a writer of fiction, I hadn't gotten very far. I just wanted to do it.

I talk about any number of things on my Facebook space. Politics. Current events. The writing life. The latest tempests in a teapot centering on fandom. Daily doings from my own life. My cats, for crying out loud. Flights of humorous fantasy. Books, both those I've read and those I've written. Movies. And occasionally, TV shows.

My first, 'Room on the Roof,' was the longest book I've written.