Quotes About Writing

When I started writing, I was a great rationalist and believed I was absolutely in control. But the older one gets, the more confused, and for an artist I think that is quite a good thing: you allow in more of your instinctual self; your dreams, fantasies and memories. It's richer, in a way.

I think writers process their own experiences through the characters and situations they write. So for Batman, I used my own experience of losing a loved one. Grief is a strange place; it's like an altered state. You might sleep too much, so you can see the dead in your dreams.

My advice to anyone with writerly ambitions and a demanding day job is to set aside a little piece of time, even an hour a week if that's all you can manage, and make it yours. This is your writing hour. Even if you use it up by staring at a blank screen and daydreaming, so what?

A writer is someone who tells you one thing so someday he can tell his readers another thing: what he was thinking but declined to say, or what he would have thought had he been wiser. A writer turns his life into material, and if you're in his life, he uses yours, too.

You have very short travel blogs, and I think there's a split among travel writers: the service-oriented writers will say, 'Well, the reader wants to read about his trip, not yours.' Whereas I say, the reader just wants to read a good story and to maybe learn something.

Building out a professional profile on LinkedIn certainly makes sense, and bolstering that CV with intelligent pieces of writing is also a great idea. But if you're going to take the time to create content, you should also take the time to create a home for that content that is yours and yours alone.

Now, as a writer, the whole world is your nail polish display, and what's more, you can help yourself. A thrilling, colourful array of gorgeous human peculiarity revolves before your eyes, and you still can't quite believe it's all yours for the taking.

Writing has always been an incredible outlet for me to feel like I have a voice, even when sometimes I was the only one reading my work. It has been a way for me to unlock my imagination. That's when the world becomes yours, after all.

That's one of the great things about creativity. You labor away in a room, and when you're writing a film, it couldn't be more of a solitary activity or a lonelier job, but if you then write a film that gets made and goes out into the world, it kind of flies away from you. It's not yours anymore.

My life has been such a blur since I was 18, 19 years old. I haven't even had time to contemplate my own life. By forcing yourself to write your life story you learn a great deal about yourself.

Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.

When you die, others who think they know you, will concoct things about you... Better pick up a pen and write it yourself, for you know yourself best.

It's not easy. I got lots of rejections when I first started out. If you want to write, you have to believe in yourself and not give up. You have to do your best to practice and get better.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

I'm a writer; as soon as I imagine what would happen if I found the fountain of youth, it turns into a dystopia in my head.

I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'

I thought people cared about music in a deep way, so I was writing to that spirit in people and in myself. It was me, thinking I knew what was up. Youth, who else can change the world?

I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.

I wanted to leave home, and I didn't know where I was going or what I was going to do or what would happen. That's youth, though. Being fixated on things. I was fixated on being a writer.

What I've learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that 'youthful energy' will only get you so far.

It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: 'Why not try writing a novel?' partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother's family.

I was writing a scene where a guy was choking another guy to death. You can go online and type 'chokeholds' and watch scenes where martial artists choke each other out. You can hear what noises they make when they go unconscious, see how their bodies flop and everything. YouTube is amazing for the more detailed stuff.

I write every day. Most weekdays, I write about ten hours a day. That doesn't mean eight hours of surfing the Net or watching videos on YouTube. I park my butt in a chair and write... I learned that writer's block is a myth created by people who don't have, or understand, a writing process.

It's funny, I'd rather be known as a writer who crafted a really nice piece about women's friendships over time. But that doesn't roll off the tongue like 'YouTube sensation.'