Quotes About Writing

He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory.

A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out

If a wound is great you cannot turn it into something that is spoken, it can barely be written.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

Experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing.

How can you possibly expect to write anything when you can't concentrate? That's pretty much all writers do: take the blooming multiplicity of the world and our experience of it, literally concentrate it down to manageable proportions, and then force it through the eye of a grammatical needle one word at a time.

My confidence in telling this story gradually returned, and after a month I could write again; you can judge how well that's going, but at least it's going.

Writing is about music...finding the music of a sentence....

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

If I were actually Homer Simpson, I'd be getting scripts out the wazoo.

I feel that performing is its own art form, and recording is its own art form, and writing is its own art form, and that they all can happen simultaneously but at different paces.

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

People don't understand how much time and work it takes to make somebody laugh, and how hard it is to write a script, to put together the story, the characters. When everyone laughs simultaneously, there's no greater feeling.

I'm never happier when writing than when I see gags taking shape - ideally, gags at my own expense. What I like is the shuttling back and forth, serious into comedy and vice-versa, ideally, both in the same sentence, or even simultaneously. The best jokes are always ideas in miniature.

I'm writing all the time. I tend to work on at least two books simultaneously. I'll spend time with one, and then I'll spend time with the other. Finishing takes whatever time it takes.

To me, the best writing points to something literal or common but is also nuanced: The moment when somebody is telling you they love you while simultaneously disappointing you. Everybody's experienced that.

An original something, dear maid, you would wish me to write; but how shall I begin? For I'm sure I have not original in me, Excepting Original Sin.

My husband is old-fashioned and kind, he does the greatest Sinatra impression, and I'd never have written anything if he hadn't read all those bedtime stories and unloaded the dishwasher while I slaved over chapters.

It's a little silly to finally learn how to write at this age. But I long ago realized I was secretly sincere.

I think I'm genuinely sincere, and that's what hopefully makes it work. I take that very seriously when I'm writing.

You know, I mean this sincerely, you know, I'm so grateful that I get to get up in the morning and do this, you know, and write books.

All I can guess is that when I write, I forget that it's not real. I'm living the story, and I think people can read that sincerity about the characters. They are real to me while I'm writing them, and I think that makes them real to the readers as well.

My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.