Quotes About Writing

I always try, if I can, to travel before I start a writing project. For me, travelling is my education. It inspires me, and it clears my mind and allows me to come back with a cleansed palate.

Travelling is difficult, and writers tend to want to stay at home and do their work.

For me, travelling and drawing the world, experiencing as much as possible first hand, has been very important. Making notes, drawing and writing on the move, became second nature.

The space where writing happens is a unique space that's hard to define, and when you're kicked out of it because you're travelling or distracted, it seems so elusive and hard to defend because you yourself doubt whether it existed.

A good 60 per cent of my time I spend travelling, mostly to the U.S., Canada and Germany.

Even when I'm travelling - which is when I do most of my writing - I have a little portable keyboard.

The business of writing a novel is a long, meandering road into the self, into the imagination. And it's a road the writer travels alone.

Although I still think of myself as an actress, most of my time is spent writing novels or memoirs about my adventures and travels.

Literature has been a treacherous site for black Americans because literary production has been so tied with the project of proving our humanity through the act of writing.

When you're writing for a sequel and there's a movie that's been deemed sacred ground by the fanbase that's the predecessor, you cannot do anything to tread on that, so it's a bit trickier than just being able to sit down and write something.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

When really writing I'm not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I'm incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I'll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill.

Writing is a sedentary gig unless one has a treadmill desk. But I have long believed writing and working out are complementary disciplines.

My past is very interesting, and I treasure it, but to write about it, it's just not on my radar.

I am thrilled to write 'The Treasure Chest,' and to bring to life not only the childhoods of famous people from history, but also the characters of Maisie and Felix, who I hope you will fall in love with just as I have!

I will always treasure the privilege of writing the 'Sports of The Times' column.

After I left Treasury, I think in some ways it was harder to sit there and be writing my book... listening to all the criticism.

A major focus of 'Reality Hunger' is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.

During that first year, I felt guilty that my wife was out working bringing in all our income, while I was at home playing on the computer, so I made myself treat writing like a job.

I have to say, 'Pod' was a bon-bon, a treat to myself. A treat to write: a happy, pleasurable write.

I treat my writing like a day job, like my main job, even if for many years I was doing other jobs to pay the bills. I worked as a copy editor. I was a medical guinea pig. I was an eBay power seller of ladies' handbags. I was an assistant to a bookie at the horse races. I bartended. I did anything I could to make ends meet.

Everywhere I go, I find that writers are treated as if they are invisible, as if they don't matter.

I called the doctor, during writing the book, the psychiatrist who treated me at that time, Dr. Jackson. And I said, Dr. Jackson, whole pieces are missing. I don't understand what happened to me.

I always treated writing as a profession, never as a hobby. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.