Quotes About Writing

I was going to write a book on procrastination, but I kept putting it off.

As a personal comparison, my total lifetime output of published material has been a bit under 3 million words, and over the past 30 years I've written about 15 million words of email, and altogether typed perhaps 50 million words—and in just the past couple of years I've spoken more than 10 million words on livestreams. And, yes, I'll train a bot from all of that.)

I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography

I am writing a book. I have got the page numbers done.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

writing is about developing the capacity to expose yourself on the page, if not your life story at the very least your prevailing anxieties and the people who caused them.

By attempting to "write bad" for twenty minutes, they'd somehow managed to produce remarkable work. From AWP - The Writer's Notebook

I'm a morning person because I learned to write my novels while still practicing law. I would get to the office at 6:30 a.m. and write until other people arrived, around 9. Now I still do that. I start at 6:30 or 7, and I'll write until 11, then take an hour off, then work until about 2 p.m. By then my brain has had enough.

The trick is always to write in pairs because if at least two people find it funny, you've immediately halved the odds of it not being funny.

I love Sherlock Holmes. I've got all his books, leather-bound. What I thought was great about Sherlock Holmes was that not only was he a supersleuth, he was also a hard worker. Not only did he go out and solve the crimes, he came home and wrote it all down. Fantastic. That's why I admire him.

Concrete, sensory details such as these allow readers to form vivid pictures in their minds of what is being described. That is how writers bring a scene to life.

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading.

I've always liked this Nietzsche quote: "You must still have chaos in yourself to be able to give birth to a dancing star." There's a lot to love about that, I think. Not least, personally, as it gives me hope that whatever sprawling, chaotic, nonsensical draft I'm working on might eventually turn out good. In writing as in life.

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When an idea comes you must capture it before the idea vanishes forever. The best way to do this is to keep a pen and paper on hand at all times.

She prefers to think she became a better woman. But she has hurt her sister, and she knows it. The fact that she did it to save herself is no excuse. Nor is the knowledge that she's only done what writers do. A novelist is just a cottonmouth with a laptop.

Paarfi undertakes a detailed examination on the virtues of brevity: It would seem, therefore, that if we allow our readers, by virtue of being in the company of the historian, to eavesdrop on this interchange, we will have, in one scene, discharged two obligations; a sacrifice, if we may say so, to the god Brevity, whom all historians, indeed, all who work with the written word, ought to worship. We cannot say too little on this subject.

Captain," said Khaavren, both by way of affirmation and correction, thus conveying the maximum amount of information in the fewest possible words; a custom of his, and one that this historian has, in fact, adopted for himself, holding efficiency of language to be a high virtue in all written works without exception.

Writing is a labor-intensive task.

if you're writing a memo or e-mail and begin a middle paragraph, "Most important …" you've written a bad memo or e-mail.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it's a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.

I get up every morning early, when the sky is red, and write for 10 hours.

I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.