Quotes About Writing

Just start writing and you'll find what you want to say.

There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you.

There's no agony like [getting started]. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.

If you're a writer there will come at least one morning in your life when you wake up and want to kill your agent.

Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean

Face it, you have to be sort of an egomaniac to write something down and think that anyone is going to want to read it.

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

To me, writing is the most fun. It's not always fun, but finally when you make it come out the way you want, it's then you can say, 'It's fun, boy.'

I have a thing - I call it magic - but I feel like I can write stuff down in the middle of the night and wake up and it happens. I write what I want in my journal.

When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.

When I started publishing, I got offers to write for big magazines. But I would always say, "Well, it's not that I don't want to write for these big magazines, but you can't edit it."

You run into people who want to write poetry who don't want to read anything in the tradition. That's like wanting to be a builder but not finding out what different kinds of wood you use.

Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.

Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.

Agents and publishers only want one thing - good writing.

The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.

Someday, as an exercise, you might ask a writer to give himself the questions he wants to answer. If you really want a writer's opinions, you have to ask for them. What you read might surprise you.

...One reason I became a writer was that I figured out that if you call yourself a writer, you can read all you want and people think that you are working.

George [Lucas] wanted to know whether we'd be interested. He did say that if we didn't want to do it, they wouldn't cast another actor in our parts - they would write us out.

Editors always want to know what you're working on, what you're thinking about.

You're talking to someone, to a reader, and you get to express in the way you want to. And you get to play with it. It's kind of like acting, but it's on paper.

It's a sin for a writer to go looking for camels to put into his or her pages. I only want details that are the story.