Quotes About Writing

I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.

I wanted to write about this tropical honeymoon in part because I had the most drastically terrible honeymoon.

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books.

Once you start writing a character visually, you're in trouble.

I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.

Things I used to get in trouble for writing at 'SNL,' suddenly other people like it.

Diplomacy in a sense is the opposite of writing. You have to disperse yourself so much: the lady who comes in crying because she's had a fight with the secretary; exports and imports; students in trouble; thumbtacks for the embassy.

I have trouble writing if I can't picture how things are going to look.

But no, I don't generally have trouble with spelling mistakes.

When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You're got to write from deep inside.

I always have trouble with titles for my books. I usually have no title until the editor has to present the book and calls me frantically, 'Judy, we need a title.'

The trouble with the jokes is that once they're written, I know how they're supposed to work, and all I can do is not hit them. I'm more comfortable improvising. If I have just two or three ideas and I know how the character feels, what the character wants, everything in between is like trapeze work.

Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.

It would be amazing to play Sylvia Plath. She was so dark, and what came out of her writing was troubled and fierce. The dimensions, levels, layers and levels would be incredible to take on.

I was pretty troubled for a long time. And I didn't know that. As a kid, I never talked about my emotions. My mom gave me a journal, but I didn't know what it meant. I just wrote all the time, not even thinking about it. But it also made me feel better.

I have a fondness for writing about precocious, troubled teenagers, who are alienating, but kind of endearing. It's from remembering so clearly that time in my own life. I experienced myself as more dramatically troubled than I was, but I just remember how it felt.

I'm not quite sure when I began to be troubled by the creeping sense of my own ludicrousness, but it persisted - and eventually grew into a fascination. I started writing about it. Thus, in His characteristically mysterious way, the Lord made clear His plans for me.

Writing is nagging, fascinating, troublesome and exciting.

I'm a really a fanatical reviser, and there comes a point where I have to declare a truce with the text, or I'll keep fooling with it forever.

I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go. But there's just that few days of frustration to get to that point.

I live with my family on the top of a hill in the country, and during the days, my house is quiet, save for the occasional excitement of the FedEx truck heading up the driveway. I write.

It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'

When I write about places in L.A. - like where the best taco truck is or something - it's not about L.A. To me, it's about Harry Bosch, because he's the guy that does these things and has this experience.