Quotes About Writing

When Pep played this incredibly attractive and multifaceted football in Barcelona, a lot was written and said about Barca's playing with the ball. But the real madness was counter-pressing. Most opponents never had the ball for longer than five seconds before they got smashed by this machine.

I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.

Every now and then, someone will tell me that one of my books has made them laugh out loud. I never believe them because: a.) my books don't make me laugh out loud; and b.) sometimes I have said this to a writer, when really what I meant was, 'Your book made me smile appreciatively.'

I like writers who seem to write because they have to. You get the feeling of this burning desire to tell a story. I find it in Peter Carey, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith and David Foster Wallace.

People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.

By the time I started high school, I knew I wanted to be a writer. After graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, I moved to New York City and worked for the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson.

I happen to think Martin Cruz Smith is very good.

As a guest who doesn't eat, drink or smoke, you leave much to be desired, but as a writer, you're my girl.

I'm really boring. I get up early. I go to bed early. I don't smoke or drink. I mean, I'll eat a cupcake. I'm just not a crazy, stay-out-all-night sort of person. I love writing.

A writer appears in everything that he does. That said, I felt like writing characters with my own name, in fact, provided me with something of a smoke screen.

I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.

I'm a constant idiot in conversation - I always seem to sound either smug or stupid. Writing plays was a way of winning the conversation by controlling the conversation.

If I'm writing a furiously angry scene, I have to consciously snap out of it when I shut down the computer, or I find myself growling at my family.

How many times have you opened a book, read the first few sentences and made a snap decision about whether to buy it? When it's your book that's coming under this casual-but-critical scrutiny, you want the reader to be instantly hooked. The way to accomplish this is to create compelling opening sentences.

I was always writing. I was writing in high school because it was a really competitive school for class clowns; I used to have to write all of my snaps and my disses the night before and then act like I was making it up the next day.

I get really flowery and verbose in my adult books, but I don't think I dumb down my Y.A. It's just cleaner and more snappy. And the adult books have multiple points-of-view. In my Y.A., it's always third person from the main character's perspective.

I make no secret of the fact that writing She-Hulk can serve as an opportunity for me to sneak in some really cool characters that I personally love. Some will be obvious fits, but others will come out of left field - but that's what's fun about the Marvel U - the bench is deep.

I need to write in a small room - the smaller the better. I can't write in a big room where someone might sneak up behind my back.

If I sit down to write a young-adult novel, then I'm going to write either to the punch-pulling expectation of what I can't do, or I'm going to go the other way and think about what can I sneak in to be 'down with the kids' - which would be excruciating.

You've only got so much plot, character and psychological capital. One day it will be gone and you don't know when that day is. The fear is that it'll sneak up on you when you're not looking.

Because I write just at home, I'm just in my T-shirt and sneakers all the time.

My showbiz career started with 'SNL,' and to write an 'SNL' book... well, there are already enough of those.

My dad would write these sketches for me while I was at 'SNL.'

Getting on 'SNL' wasn't just about getting cast. I had written all this stuff in my audition, and I wrote several things that got on the air. But to me, I've never been interested in being picked. So when I do get sent things, most of the time I do pass on them because it doesn't feel like it would be fulfilling.