Quotes About Insight

Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.

Music helps me immeasurably in the writing process.

One of the things is, in the writing process, if you do it enough, you have a sense of where you are. I didn't have that with the first book as I was writing it. Now, as I write books, I have a sense of where I am. Unfortunately, the sense of where I am is usually behind.

I try not to think too much about my writing process - I tend to feel my way forward and find more insights that way.

I don't really like questions about the writing process, because the truth is I don't know how I write.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

I hate when books are written from the wrong perspective; when they're written by adults for tweenagers. Like, do you truly remember what it's like to be 12? No, not really.

The role of a goalkeeper is difficult to judge, above all if you haven't been a goalkeeper. It's like me giving an opinion on someone's job without having had any experience in their sector. You start to realise how many stupid things are said and written about goalkeepers.

Since I've written many of my books from a less-than-sympathetic viewpoint, I think that being able to see things from all sides is a useful talent.

When man invents or produces anything of any value, volumes are written on the subject.

There is no question that creative intelligence comes not through learning things you find in books or histories that have already been written, but by focusing on and giving value to experience as it happens.

Many of my books are written from a female perspective. I rather enjoy the take that women have on the world, and certainly I enjoy the conversations that women have.

You learn, even at 'S.N.L.,' that the funniest scripts a lot of the time were written with the actor, because they know what makes people laugh. It's always going to be better if they own it.

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

I've certainly written a lot of things that have more or less come true. But I don't have a gift for prophecy.

To me, every interview, even if you love the artist, needs to be somewhat adversarial. Which doesn't mean you need to attack the person, but you do need to look at it like you're trying to get information that has not been written about before.

I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.

Language and written language are the only real way we have to see inside another person's thoughts and to know what makes another person human. Without writing, we just wouldn't have that kind of access.

I have written about the women around me. My ancestors, my relatives, lovers. It was a way of trying to make it all make sense.

Learning to read the Bible in the light of the times in which it was written is critical.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

If someone is going down the wrong road, he doesn't need motivation to speed him up. What he needs is education to turn him around.

The more I learn about things, I realise how wrong I was before.

We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.