Quotes About Writing

If you are feeling something, then Shakespeare felt it and wrote about it - and wrote about it so eloquently.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I'm in this for the long haul.

Kickback is a police thriller which I wrote. I'm very proud of it. I did it in two parts for France because when I wrote it, there wasn't the audience demand for crime stuff that there is now.

I've actually always started with what feels most natural. Which is, the people who surround me in my daily life. So, the first show I ever wrote, which is called 'Surface Transit,' was based in part on people I knew from my family. Co-workers, ex-boyfriends. All of that kind of thing.

It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.

I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.

We wrote what sounded good to us and hoped it would find a home.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

And that's how I wrote to NICAP, but then later, just very soon after that, like three weeks later, we started getting phone calls from government agents.

For the novels I wrote before selling anything, I didn't outline much. I had a vague idea of the story.

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

But the character was so successful, that first one, that they wrote him again and he came in right at the end of the first year in a show called THE BOX. I was up for the Emmy for that one too.

My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.

Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.

In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels.

Christ himself wrote nothing, but furnished endless material for books and songs of gratitude and praise.

It's called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn't realize what a rage I was in.

I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished.

Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.

I wrote that letter, and the one to Nixon. And I wrote more letters, and I thought it might be a magazine article. At that time I sent it to Esquire and Playboy, but anyway, I kept writing, and all of sudden I had enough and thought, well maybe it is a book.