Quotes About Writing

It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.

I move between the two: I write an adult novel, and then I write a children's book. I quite enjoy that. It's a nice change of pace each time.

No matter how wonderful the story, it has to move on something, and that is language. The words that I use, the pace, the rhythm and cadences all need to be there. If they're not there, the story is like a boat that just sits there and doesn't move on the ocean.

The danger of serialization is that you almost get into a monotone - where they all have the same beat and pace, and it's all one long thing - and when you can kind of do this interesting mixture of episodic and serialization, you can kind of take the audience on a more interesting journey.

Edgar Rice Burroughs taught me pace and gave me a sense of action and adventure.

In general, I don't really think too much about pacing, myself. You kind of look at each script and what each script demands.

I had assumed I'd pack my bags and head elsewhere after 'Constellation,' but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book.

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

I wanted to express myself more fully through writing and directing. It just feels like a package deal. Anytime you create anything, you try to exert mastery over your world.

There's a lot of writing in television that can sound like it's taken out of a package, and the way to get around that is to not allow yourself to deliver it that way.

It was a little at a time but I broke out my Walkman and my lyric pad and started writing.

So I think I sometimes will put a cliche in and then just pad it out so you're not noticing.

I love being a writer. I have a great life. I get up in the morning and pad around in my dressing gown and listen to Radio 4.

I keep a note pad because, sometimes, my thoughts get jammed up, and this is the only way that I can just, I can put brakes on it and brace myself, and just really, I feel like it's better when I see it on paper.

Writing is always a restorative process. It's like paddling a kayak. When you're writing, you can't do anything else. You're in the space you're in. So, in that way, it's enormously centering and restorative.

I write every day weekdays for about 5 hours, mostly longhand on legal pads. It has gotten neither harder nor easier, sadly or happily.

I enjoy the freedom of the blank page.

Writing on the beach is not what it's cracked up to be. The sand blows, and you perspire, and the page gets all blotty and messed up, so I don't do that anymore.

I live for the blank page.

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

The flaw of an amateur is to assume what's in our head is what's on the page.

Whatever's good about your book should be good on page 1, or very few editors are going to get to page 2.

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.

When I write, the first blank page, or any blank page, means nothing to me. What means something is a page that has been filled with words.