Quotes About Writing

I have been writing now for over a week. I find it cleansing, refreshing; it is good for me." (p.531)

Wraeththu have been with me for the greater part of my life. My first rather ham-fisted (and half-finished) stories about them began in my mid-teens. It wasn't until I was twenty-six that I began work properly on the full-length novel that became The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, first volume of the Wraeththu trilogy, which was published in 1987. This was followed by The Bewitchments of Love and Hate and the Fulfilments of Fate and Desire.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

It was a typical Soviet ploy. People were forever quoting Lenin, much of the time with a great deal of creativity, knowing that even scholars had a difficult time identifying quotations from the mass of Lenin's writing and speeches. Rostnikov

My writing is like a ten gallon spring. It can issue from the ground anywhere at all. On smooth ground it rushes swiftly on and covers a thouasand li in a single day without difficulty. When it twists and turns among mountains and rocks, it fits its form to things it meets: unknowable. What can be known is, it always goes where it must go, always stops where it cannot help stopping -- nothing else. More than that, even I cannot know.

I focus on the writing and let the rest of the process take care of itself. I've learned to trust my own instincts and I've also learned to take risks.

And most, like me, were drawn to the miracle of the blank page and how, when seeded with letters, it blossomed into words and sentences and paragraphs and stories.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

I think Jane Austen should write something a bit more modern.

I understand now my father really thought he was doing me good. Education means a lot to Palestinians. We've become some of the most educated people in the world through our diaspora. We've had to be. When you ain't got land, your degree may be your only solid ground. May father felt (feels) that being a doctor would give me security. How can I explain that I'm not safe from anything if I don't write?

Even teaching them to write an essay turned out to be dangerous, since the idea of coming up with your own thesis and making an argument based on evidence doesn't exist in North Korea.

W. H. Auden used to say, rather pungently, that he could only truly "see" a poem once it's typed because "a man likes his own handwriting the way he likes the smell of his own farts.

The old nut goes, 'Write what you know,' but often a writer is clearer about what he doesn't know and must learn about.

all historical fiction is really contemporary fiction; you write out of your own time.44

Writing is born out of passion and desire, but it is bred, brought up, in obsession and compulsion. Feed your drive to persist. Damn your fears. Claim your writing as your own,

May my passage through life and my own writing be as pure as the Earth's own pen. Please, I entreated, may it be so.

Writers often write their best when they are feeling their worst

Twenty-first-century American writers do not drink much.

I go back and forth between input phases where I'm reading a lot or trying to get out and explore the world a bit and soak up inspirations and then I'll get back into output mode and write and write and write.

Writing for a soap - writing for 25 characters day in, day out - is one of the most difficult jobs in Hollywood.

When my career started on daytime soaps, those characters usually didn't have much depth to them. The main goal was to memorize my lines in order to film efficiently the next day. But with 'Jane The Virgin,' the writing is strong, and everything is intentional.

I never, ever drink while writing. Never have from the start, and I'm happy that I never have to. A lot of my stuff is plot-driven and mathematical, and I think you need a clean and sober mind to pin down the logistics of that.

I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.

I got sober at 27 and started writing around 30 and started playing music in public around 32, 33.