Quotes About Craft

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

However you make your living is where your talent lies

I love to write. But it has never gotten any easier to do and you can't expect it to if you keep trying for something better than you can do.

It's this way, see--when a writer first starts out, he gets a big kick from the stuff he does, and the reader doesn't get any;then, after a while, the writer gets a little kick and the reader gets a little kick; and finally, if the writer's any good, he doesn't get any kick at all and the reader gets everything.

The first draft is always shit.

There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.

You know the fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it.

In writing there are many secrets too. Nothing is ever lost no matter how it seems at the time and what is left out will always show and make the strength of what is left in.

Write drunk; edit sober.

am a journalist. But like all journalists I wish to write literature

It's none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.

Writing is too goddamned hard for me to think about a soul in teh world ... I don't think about a soul, but just try to get those goddamned characters to act right.

It's the form it takes when it comes out the other side, of course, that gives a story something unique--its life. The story, in the way it has arrived at what it is on the page, has been something learned, by dint of the story's challenge and the work that rises to meet it--a process as uncharted for the writer as if it had never been attempted before.

is not only the execution and the excellence of the craft that determine the quality of a witcher's sword. As with mysterious elven or gnomish blades, whose secret has been lost, the mysterious power of a witcher's sword is bound to the hand and skill of the witcher wielding it. And, forsooth, owing to that magic's mysteries it is greatly potent against the Dark Powers.

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics.

I only have a certain bag of tricks. And that's why little things, like punctuation, make such a big difference. The dash I've always relied on hugely. I know I use it even in borderline cases, where technically it isn't correct. But it moves me through the initial draft of the text, and I let a lot of my dashes stay.

But I've come to realize writing's not a noble calling. Like you said, it's all about marketing, isn't it?

A writer can write in an attic, or on top of a bus. Or with a sharp stick in some wet cement. To act, an actor has to have words. A stage. a camera turning.

You know it's very difficult to be an actor, and to have people depending on you to say the right line, at the right time, and to not be able to hear your cues! I can't tell you how many times I would've had to have said What? if I didn't have my hearing aids. So my hearing aids are a life saver, and they allow me to practice my craft.

I like to make things, but I looked at old craft books on weaving or mosaics or whatever, I'm like, 'I don't really know anything about that stuff.'

Acting, to me, has been many things: It's a business, and it's a craft, and it's a political act - it's whatever adjective is most applicable.

I had been interested in trying acting, and, like, I went to school with actors and whatnot, and I was interested in the craft but didn't really push myself to do it.

I know there is an opportunity to make some money and have a life-changing effect on me and those things are great. I don't take those things for granted whatsoever, but my focus is really on my craft.