Quotes About Writing

The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today.

From the late '70s to the early '90s, I wrote anything anybody would pay me for. This ranged from articles on how to clean a longhorn cow's skull for living-room decoration to manuals on elementary math instruction on the Apple II... to a slew of software reviews and application articles done for the computer press.

I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

I'd sold the book first. Actually to a paperback publisher. I had nothing. I just had the idea.

If anything, I feel a bit of pressure to write about less disenfranchised people, because I'd probably sell more books that way and would've already had some hot property that I could've sold to Hollywood.

Especially as an independent director, when you're writing something on spec and you're trying to get it sold, you create this entire world in your head and you feel like you know every minutiae of how everything should be.

I had a writing professor at Brandeis who told me I'd never make it - and when I sold my first novel a few years later, I sent him a copy!

I sold my very first novel when I was 24 or 25 years old.

I had immediate success in the sense that I sold something right off the bat. I thought it was going to be a piece of cake and it really wasn't. I have drawers full of - or I did have - drawers full of rejection slips.

I've written about 15 screenplays and they all sold - they were all sold on pitches.

I haven't sold to the movies. In other words, I haven't gotten any enormous checks yet.

I sold my first screenplay six months before 'Glee,' but they had the option for a year and now it's back with me.

I started in 1957 when I sold my first story to a magazine.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

I sold a million books because I have a lot of fans, not because people hate me.

I wrote 'Don't Look Back' in November 2011, and when I wrote the novel, it wasn't contracted, so there was a freedom in that - no expectations or anything like that. It was also my first contemporary novel I'd written and sold, which was to Disney/Hyperion in January of 2012.

Writing one's first novel, getting it sold, and shepherding it through the labyrinths of editing, production, marketing, journalism, and social media is an arduous and nerve-wracking process.

I sold 'Hattie Big Sky' without an agent but quickly realized a writing career required an agent.

I sold my first story when I was 21 in 1973.

The books I've written the fastest were the best reviewed and sold the best.

I think I became less literary after I sold more!

I cranked out a book. I didn't expect it to do much, but it's sold 80,000 copies.

You have to remember that Shadow and Bone' was the first book I sold. And it was, in fact, the first book I ever finished writing, despite many attempts before that to finish a novel. And when I was writing it, I didn't know if anybody was going to buy one book, let alone all three.