Quotes About Writing

Two years passed, and I had no second book to follow 'Roots.' Four years passed, six years. When a decade had passed without me having another book to follow 'Roots,' I was having serious private frustrations with myself.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.

I've got plenty of quirks. I go to an office early in the morning. Early in the morning is really good writing time. I take anywhere between six to eight showers a day. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not a germaphobe: it's all about a fresh start.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

I'm married. I've been with my husband for six years. Now that I know what a healthy relationship is, I find I can write better about the unhealthiness of relationships.

I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine.

But compared to writing a novel, where you can be God, I did the Bay of Pigs invasion in six pages once, and there were 50,000 guys with boots that I didn't have to pay, and all those extras; we didn't have to pay them.

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

If I had killed Crow off I can think of least six novels I would never have written, 400,000 words' worth of very necessary experience.

Our reward for Starsky and Hutch was getting to write The Six Million Dollar Man for Todd.

I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.

When I'm really fixated on a bit of writing, I can easily spend six days without leaving the house and barely leaving my room.

I work on one book at a time. And yes, I am immersed. Six days a week for four to six hours a day. In between books, I stop writing for as much as two to three months, but during that time, I do research and think, plot and plan the book.

Writing sessions can last an hour or sixteen hours, depending on how it's going.

It took me sixteen years to write.

I've never played instruments. I've always been a singer or a writer, for that matter. But I started playing in bands when I was sixteen years old.

If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it.

My feeling is that I don't really care about the genre or the size of the movie. I care about the quality of the writing and the quality of the characters.

The whole world of publishing is moving to electronic, but when you put a poem on a screen and you increase the type size, the shape of a poem changes.

You can't improv off of bad writing. Then you have to actually create your objective, which is really hard to do in an element without the skeleton to go off of.

When I first began to have the initial idea for 'Heartsease,' I just wrote a skeleton story; that is, I started her off as this young, bright 16-year-old and then added the events that occurred and where she and other characters fitted in, even writing 3 different endings, as I was not sure where Mary's story would lead to.

I just feel that if I'm English and writing about an American president, I have got to have someone on my side who can help me out when I'm lapsing into lazy or obvious European skepticism.

When I'm writing, I'm creating the story and its character with words. I'm thinking about what the pictures will be like, but I never begin to sketch. The pictures are all in my head.