Quotes About Writing

Where do you get inspiration for your books? I tell myself I can't have another cup of coffee till I thought of an idea.

And I write novels! chimed in the other cop. Though I haven't had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I'm in a meeeean mood!

I am fascinated by religion. (That's a completely different thing from believing in it!) It has had such an incalculably huge effect on human affairs. What is it? What does it represent? Why have we invented it? How does it keep going? What will become of it? I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.

You can't throw us into space," yelled Ford, "we're trying to write a book." "Resistance is useless!" shouted the Vogon guard back at him. It was the first phrase he'd learned when he joined the Vogon Guard Corps.

Writing episodically meant that when I finished one episode I had no idea about what the next one would contain. When, in the twists and turns of the plot, some event suddenly seemed to illuminate things that had gone before, I was as surprised as anyone else.

He sat and tapped his teeth with a pencil again and watched his sofa slowly revolving on the screen of his computer.

He had run out of patience and pencils and was feeling very hungry.

Good writers don't moralize, nor do they preach, but they do create longing for the true and the beautiful, and that is why you must write with Christ at the center of your reason for writing. That does not mean that every book must be a retelling of Luke's gospel, however, every worthy book written by a Christian will direct readers away from self, and sin, and put them on a quest for God and his gospel. Create longing for these things.

How did society ever function without you, little Sharpies? Your nibs have the precise amount of give to create a line quality with character, yet not so much character as to be smushy. Thank you, little pens.

There's something fun about Sharpies that's really hard to articulate.

And if you were such a good clairvoyant, why didn't you just write things straight out? What's with all the stupid rhyming quatrains? Thanks for nothing.

Unlike most fine writers, he wasn't in love with his own words.

Douglas Preston

Do you know, I've always believed there's no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written—that's all.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because when two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.

She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

I mean, what can you say about how you write your books? What I mean is, first you've got to think of something, and then when you've thought of it you've got to force yourself to sit down and write it. That's all." ~ Mrs. Oliver

It was not until I was over twenty that I realised that my home standard had been unusually high and that actually I was quite as quick or quicker than the average. Inarticulate I shall always be. It is probably one of the causes that have made made me a writer.

Write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you are writing, and aren't writing particularly well.