Quotes About Writing

Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy.

I said I didn't like tricks, I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page. He said it wasn't possible to recreate life on the page without tricks.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction. It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who's a genius on his best days).

The details were apt and convincing enough, but surely not so very difficult to marshal if you were halfway observant and had the patience to write them all down.

She was on course now, and had found satisfaction on other levels; writing stories not only involved secrecy, it also gave her all the pleadures of miniaturization. A world could be made in five pages and one that was more pleasing than a model farm. The childhood of a spoiled prince could be framed with half a page a moonlit dash through sleepy villages was one rhythmically emphatic sentence, falling in love could be achieved in a single word - a glance.

Now that Stephen had joined the throng he expected, with so much reading and talking and listening behind him, to be an expert, like everybody else. But it was as if he were trying to write afresh a book that had already been written. The ground was so well prepared, planted up with myth and cliché, and the tradition so firmly established, that he could no more think clearly about his own situation than a medieval painter could, by taking thought, invent perspective.

I write from life. But the reader, you know, imports the symbols, the associations. I can't keep them out. That's how poetry works.

she could write the scene three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains.

Como pode uma escritora expiar os seus pecados se, com o poder absoluto de decidir o final, é em certa medida Deus? Não há ninguém, nenhuma entidade, nenhum ser superior a quem ela possa apelar, com quem possa reconciliar-se ou que possa perdoar-lhe.

She had never lost that childhood pleasure in seeing pages covered in her own handwriting.

Language belongs, not to the academics, but those who use it

I've read your summary. And? It's not incompetent. Be still, my heart, so I don't faint from such faint phrase. Did you expect it to be written in crayon?

Finally, thank you very much to Jeaniene Frost and Jill Myles. This book does have sex in it. Please don't hit me anymore. ~Ilona Andrews in the Acknowledgements section of Magic Bleeds

I have the same interests as women. Well, apart from football and music, obviously. I've always had as many female friends as male ones. The novels I read as a young man were all by women writers, and when I started writing, I wanted to set my books inside the home.

I read John Irving's novel 'The World According To Garp' when I was about 14 or 15. It was the first grown-up book that I had read. It is the story of a young man who grows up to be a novelist. I finished it, and I wanted to write a book that made the reader feel the way I felt at the end of that, which was sort of both bereft and elated.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

I've written a couple of scripts. Actually, a pilot. I'm not sure I'm allowed to say, but it's a comedy about three young men in New York City, one of whom may or may not be a romantic like me.

With my first book, 'A Letter to a Young Brother,' I figured it would be my only book I was ever going to write. What happened with that is a lot of young men would reach out to me.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

I'm a very introverted person. Nothing that's happened has changed that, but one of the reasons I write for teens is it's a real privilege to have a seat at the table in the lives of young people when they're figuring out what matters to them.

Part of my motivation for writing mysteries for young people is that I loved mysteries when I was growing up, and now that I'm on the creative end of things, I'm discovering that they're even more fun to write!

I just believe that young people need to be able to learn how to write in their own voice. Just like a musician, you pride yourself on having your own distinct sound.

I tell young people who ask me about a future in writing not to go into it unless they get married to someone rich.

The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but they are not writing. You know, they really badly want to write a book but they are not writing it. The only advice I can give them is to just write it, get to the end of it. And, you know, if it's not good enough, write another one.