Quotes About Process

I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.

A lot of new writers assume you have to know the where the story is going and that it flows out as molten gold. But really, sometimes you think you are going to one place, but then you decide that is dumb idea. Then you go somewhere else and it is a worse idea. But then you switch again and you might have a beautiful accident.

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.

Some writers - most, I suspect - write in isolation. I think I'd always found that quite difficult.

I think some people think that writers read and read and read, get the information, and then write. That's not how it works. Often, you write yourself into a dark place where you don't know what you need to know, so you go get the information.

You can write ten versions of a scene, and then, on the day, discover that something in the original scene worked. It's hard on writers. Hard on actors, hard on editors, hard on me, hard on the producers, who require patience and confidence. But I can't get to the end without going through this process.

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.

I'm not one of these 'the characters write themselves; the story just fell out of me' kind of writers. Wish it was like that.

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

New writers don't throw tantrums, they have time. I can make them work on one song for a week.

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere.

Nowadays they have 12 directors and 15 producers and 30 writers. And all the writers want their lines said a certain way-which isn't necessarily funny. I mean the lines aren't necessarily so funny to begin with.

I spend days with writers' block. It is a problem.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.

I think writers are very anxious.

No one writes as slowly as I do, I'm convinced. It's so hard for me. I learn slowly; I make decisions at a snail's pace.

I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.

I felt a little green, because Shakespeare writes the thought process within the text; it was tricky not to think of what to say and then say it, and instead just deliver the lines.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

Shakespeare teaches you how to act. You come out of this process as a better actor. It's just the nature of the words he writes.

I'm not somebody who carries around a notepad and writes songs all day long. I don't imagine everything I think of is worth being in a song. So I tend to collect notes, and I set time aside to go to work and write songs.