Quotes About Writing

I've been a freelancer my entire career, and, at any given time, I have several deadlines for all sorts of things, whether it's some magazine piece or ad copywriting or anything.

It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.

For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.

I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.

Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.

Now I've got a fairly good grasp of the 18th century on what was common and what people thought. But I don't write in order. I write bits and pieces and sort of glue them.

I'm just doing little bits and pieces for other magazines right now.

As I'm writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.

When you are young, hone your craft and write shorter pieces instead of novels, because it's really hard to finish a novel.

A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.

The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself.

I'm always jotting things down on pieces of paper. I've got pieces of paper all over my house.

I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.

The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

I worked with some directors, and it was really collaborative, and I was sort of writing with them. I was giving so many pieces of myself to their movies, I thought, 'It's about time I use my own voice for me, and establish my own voice.' So I knew I wanted to make films.

I find it an easy way into writing pieces is to think what the character's voice is like, and start from there.

I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

When you're a writer, you never know which of your pieces are going to gain a toehold and which will not, and it's best not to care too much.

I would absolutely be interested in doing a Broadway production if it was the right project. But my dream is to be writing pieces of theater for my best friends and putting on plays in New York City and seeing our vision come alive. I just hope to always be creating.

I've written songs on everything. Menus. Napkins. Little pieces of paper.

Whenever anything bubbles up, I have to put it down. I have bits and pieces all over my hard drive.

My favorite pieces that I've written, either for St. Lucia or for myself, have always had a transporting quality to them, where they take you out of the moment and somewhere positive that feels nostalgic and happy but sad at the same time.