Quotes About Writing

there are a lot of women writers who never get married and don't have kids. I am married, but I didn't marry until I was 43. I knew when I was young that if I had to make a choice between being married and being a writer, I would have chosen to be a writer. I think it's a career where you have to put the career first. I don't have kids but - and luckily everyone isn't like this — I think if you have that passion, in a way, your career is your child.

Remember the stories you used to write? About that billionaire. You made fun of his fingers! Woo-hooo. 'Short-fingered vulgarian,' you called him.

doggerel to describe her experience in the Whitewater contretemps:

He paused and manufactured a chuckle.

No deliberative body is manifestly less qualified to make decisions about public education than our state Legislature. With a few shining exceptions, most of these clowns don't read, can't write, and clearly can't add.

Burnout is common because of the long hours, the crummy pay and the depressing nature of so much of what we write. As the saying goes, they never send us to the airport when the plane lands safely.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

We invented phonetic writing so we could put our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head—an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is

Writing is perhaps the greatest human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another.

When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devising computers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence.

Predictions of surprising events always prove more accurate if not set down on paper beforehand.

As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

In addition, human beings have, in the most recent few tenths of a percent of our existence, invented not only extra-genetic but also extrasomatic knowledge: information stored outside our bodies, of which writing is the most notable example.

Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity.

La escritura es quizás la mayor invención humana. Une a gente que nunca se conoció. Ciudadanos de épocas distantes. Los libros rompen las cadenas del tiempo. Un libro es la prueba de que los humanos son capaces de hacer magia

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time — proof that humans can work magic.

Of coherency, I usually attempt it.

We share a very strong series of unions with women. Women accepted us, even if they failed to understand us. This is a great gift, a firm hand as you're falling. And so we have about us a confidence and a sweetness when we are with women that we probably only have when we are writing, and words, like women, have always responded to us, moved us, stuck around.

You don't understand. When a life is completed, it ought to be put away. It's like a sonnet. When you've written the final couplet, why go on any further? You only destroy the part that's already written!

Cuando estoy encerrada en mi cuarto, no leo; ¡escribo todo aquello que se me antoja, porque el papel, este blanco luminoso papel, me guarda con amor todo cuando le digo y nunca, jamás, se escandaliza, ni me regaña, ni se pone las manos abiertas sobre los oídos!..

MarkBaynard: [...] When you wrote yr 1st book, did U ever dream it was going to be welcomed by the world w/open arms? Abby_Donovan: I didn't write it for the world. I wrote it for me. MarkBaynard: Then that's what you need to do again. Write yourself another book. Abby_Donovan: But I know in my heart I'll never write anything as good as that book. MarkBaynard: [...] It doesn't matter what you write as long as you stop beating yourself up about not writing and start writing.

Oddly enough, writing again has made me WANT to get out more. I mean, if I don't start living life, how can I write about it?

If you're a real writer, you infuse your characters with truths from your own life. The old saw is, Write What You Know. I think it equally appropriate to add. Write Who You Are. Give your readers little insights into how you think. Share your feelings and beliefs in a way that makes other question their own, thereby requiring them in some small way to reevaluate their lives. Good storytelling compels us to do this.

Fantasy writing must be grounded in both truth and life experience if it is to work. It can be as inventive and creative as the writer can make it, a whirlwind of images and plot twists, but it cannot be built on a foundation of air. The world must be identifiable with our own, must offer us a frame of reference we can recognize." "Fantasy stories work because the writer has interwoven bits and pieces of reality with imagination to form a personal vision.