Quotes About Writing

I think that 'The Outsiders' was meant to be written, and I was just picked to write it.

I've written 26 books and novellas as Molly O'Keefe. I moved through three different Harlequin lines and into single-title romance with Bantam writing under that name. Fun fact: It's not my name, and it's not even one I picked.

When I was writing the story of 'Omerta' I was not writing it to make a film or something. But when a filmmaker like Hansal Mehta picked up my story and turned it into a film, I thought that now I can consider myself as a legitimate writer.

I always lived with guitarists. When they would leave, I would just pick up their acoustic guitars and start doing finger picking and write.

When I write, I try not to cast in my head, because then I'm writing to a major movie star, and it picks up those ticks, and that's not what I want to do.

Large meadows are lovely for picnics and romping, but they are for the lighter feelings. Meadows do not make me want to write.

I landed a job with Roger Corman. The job was to write the English dialogue for a Russian science fiction picture. I didn't speak any Russian. He didn't care whether I could understand what they were saying; he wanted me to make up dialogue.

When I write, my brain moves faster than my hands so I'm always trying to picture things.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

I had tried writing novels for many years, and they always escaped me. For a long time, I thought, 'It's just not in me to write a novel. It's not something I'm able to do.' It seemed like everything I wrote naturally ended at the bottom of page three. A picture book, three pages; an essay, three pages.

Writing for children is my... that's my medium, you know, and the medium is the picture book, which is a very particular kind of book. I try to give children what I would give anybody, you know. I become interested in something. I find something fascinating. It has to fascinate me, and then I want to give it to them.

I'll always write picture books - it's just what I do. I'd even do it if I wasn't being paid.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: writing picture books is an art - the art of word choice.

I like to read and write and take pictures and bike.

My second TV assignment ever was to go to Cambodia to look at the state of the country in the dying days of the Khmer Rouge. I was naive, awkward, and not very good at writing to pictures.

I think I need pictures with my articles.

I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.

I think with pictures; I'm a very lousy writer. If I write without pictures, I become this pathetic chick sitting somewhere trying to be interesting.

'The Indian Runner' was easy. It had been incubating in me for eight years, and by the time I sat down to write the thing, I had all the pictures in my head.

I want to make books. I want to take pictures and then write all over the pictures. And then I don't have to say a complete story, because I have the picture, and I have just a word.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

I'm always writing. A friend of mine once said, 'You avoid re-writing by writing.' Which is kind of a good point, because re-writing seems to be mostly about craft, and writing is just, like, getting out your passion on a piece of paper.

As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.