Quotes About Writing

My writing, it's mostly fiction, but I want it to feel intimate and real.

I always wanted to direct and write a movie, but I thought that I didn't really have it in me. I tried to write fiction and humorous short stories, and some were considered successful, but it was always a huge effort for a small reward. I was always intimidated by the process.

I can't read fiction when I'm writing fiction, because I get intimidated if I read something really good.

Every time I try to set something in Chicago, I get intimidated by 'Augie March.' It's easy to set something in Indianapolis - we don't have 'Augie March' here. But I love writing about Chicago, and I love being there and imagining lives in Chicago. I hope to set something there in the future, but it's intimidating.

There are certain things I couldn't write because they're not intrinsic to my beliefs. For instance, I couldn't write a hero or heroine who didn't put children first.

I think journaling is an important, intrinsic experience, and a lot of us don't spend enough time on it.

A writer needs a life of introspection.

I fantasised about becoming an author and wrote my first book at 18 - an introspective novel set in the 1920s.

Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely.

I'm a writer. I'm naturally introverted, so being the public face of something, I don't think I do it well.

What I realized halfway through writing romance is that you start out intuitive, and you make all these choices mostly based on yourself and what you like and what talent you have, and... if you want to have any quality control over your product, you have to stop being intuitive and start being more of an analyst.

I sometimes write in a cafe down the road from my house now because I feel guilty trying to work if I can hear them playing. I invariably end up sat in a corner, depressed, retreating into my own world.

Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

I have the power to write these books where I invent characters that I really like, and it gets to come out the way they want it to come out, and I get to make it happen.

In fiction, you don't invent the events. What is imaginative about it is the consciousness: how you think about the events and how you present them. And that changes the nature of everything, and that is the attraction of writing fiction.

I think writing for a world one has invented can be infinitely more interesting than writing for the world we've all inherited.

You have to really understand how people speak, and you have to reconstruct it... Most pleasure in writing, you know, is in inventing.

I like inventing things when I write rather than autobiography.

Inventing characters is extraordinary: proper authors say so often that characters 'just appear' and that does happen. These people keep leaping out and saying, why don't you write about me?

I consider myself an inventor, entrepreneur, and author.

I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.

I don't think I'm the best screenwriter in the world. It's just important to me to write my movies so I'm personally invested in them.

By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in.

I'm not writing necessarily for an audience. I think about the audience at the end, once I have a complete book. But, when I'm writing it, I really need to feel like I'm learning, and I'm investigating something that I'm personally interested in.