All Quotes

I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.
‐‐ Donald McKay

I write while I'm walking, on little scraps of paper. If I have a melody going, I can feel it for days.
‐‐ Juan Felipe Herrera

I write while listening to music, mostly because the world beyond my headphones is too chaotic.
‐‐ Dean Bakopoulos

I write while my son is at school. At about 7:45 A.M., I walk him there, with the dogs, then walk them for another forty minutes or so, go home and chain myself to the desk a little before 9 A.M., and try not to be distracted until I hear my son plunge through the front door at about 3 P.M.
‐‐ Geraldine Brooks

I write with a mouse, because it has no psychological associations or memories or habits associated with it.
‐‐ Fred Frith

I write with a pen and paper. Never on a laptop.
‐‐ Robert Smith

I write with a sense of my future readers being ever on the verge of setting down the book and pronouncing it a bore. Fear and insecurity are great motivators.
‐‐ Mary Roach

I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult, and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway, and I would disapprove of it.
‐‐ Colm Toibin

I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.
‐‐ Billy Collins

I write with as much objectivity as I can.
‐‐ Ernest Gaines

I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
‐‐ John Ashbery

I write with humour about sadness, to introduce an element of sweet to the sour, a bit like Turkish food.
‐‐ Elif Safak

I write with teenagers in mind.
‐‐ Bernard Beckett

I wrote '33 Men' in eight weeks. Not only was it a combination of simultaneously writing and interviewing, but as I dug deeper into the miners' story, I found the key to their success was the ability to place their individuality on the back burner and bring forward the sense of a collective group responsibility.
‐‐ Jonathan Franklin

I wrote a book called 'Doll Bones', which was another middle-grade book, and when I was writing it, I needed a place in the U.S. that made bone china. And there are only two places in the U.S. that make bone china. They made it by grinding down actual cow bones. It was a plot point. It was a creepy doll book.
‐‐ Holly Black

I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn't find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.
‐‐ Keith Miller

I wrote a book on grace, and grace is a free gift, but to receive the gift you have to have your hands open. And a lot of people don't have their hands open, there's something they're grasping because there's a lot of things to grasp in a prosperous country.
‐‐ Philip Yancey

I wrote a book on life coaching, because my life became my own reference point how to live.
‐‐ Anupam Kher

I wrote a fan e-mail to Michael Chabon.
‐‐ Bill Hader

I wrote a few children's books... not on purpose.
‐‐ Steven Wright

I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.
‐‐ Kelly Masterson

I wrote a graphic novel called 'Soul Stealer' with big, beautiful, epic artwork by Chris Shy. It grew into a trilogy.
‐‐ Michael Easton

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.
‐‐ Dan Wakefield

I wrote a great deal... but very little of any importance; there are not more than four of five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.
‐‐ G. H. Hardy

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.
‐‐ Mark Helprin

I wrote a little autobiography about how luck has to do with everything. It's called 'My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business.' A publisher came to me and said, 'Write a book,' so I did. I wanted to call it 'Everybody Else Has Got a Book.'
‐‐ Dick Van Dyke

I wrote a lot. I was in programs for drawing when I was a kid.
‐‐ Boyd Holbrook

I wrote a lot in study hall to while away the hours.
‐‐ James Welch

I wrote a lot of 'Driving on the Rim' by giving myself the gift of being just as eccentric as I felt like.
‐‐ Thomas McGuane

I wrote a lot of fiction, but it was just college stuff. It seems to me you have to be so confident in yourself to become a writer.
‐‐ Robert Loomis

I wrote a lot of plays when I was little, and I made everyone in the neighborhood perform them with me. I was probably a really annoying friend to have when I was little.
‐‐ Melissa Ordway

I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager - mostly desperate love poetry!
‐‐ Paula McLain

I wrote a lot of 'Red Queen' wrapped in a blanket, cramped up while watching the snow come down.
‐‐ Victoria Aveyard

I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day.
‐‐ Thom Yorke

I wrote a lot when I was younger, though never anything like plays or scripts.
‐‐ Merritt Wever

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
‐‐ Jeffrey Archer

I wrote a novel about Israelis who live their own lives on the slope of a volcano. Near a volcano one still falls in love, one still gets jealous, one still wants a promotion, one still gossips.
‐‐ Amos Oz

I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn't have in Vietnam.
‐‐ Tracy Kidder

I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.
‐‐ Joyce Carol Oates

I wrote a novel for my degree, and I'm very happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with my professors who had to read it.
‐‐ David Eddings

I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.
‐‐ Jonathan Maberry

I wrote a novel in my early twenties; I won a high school prize - my short story got published, and I got 50 dollars, which was a huge deal.
‐‐ Sue Miller

I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.
‐‐ Jami Attenberg

I wrote a number of pieces in the year 1966 that were so bad that, although I'm a great collector of my own pieces, I have never collected them.
‐‐ Tom Wolfe

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'
‐‐ Pat Conroy

I wrote a piece of software in 1998 that created fictional weather.
‐‐ Daniel Suarez

I wrote a pilot for myself. It's about a Latina actress trying to make it in Hollywood. It's pretty funny.
‐‐ Melonie Diaz

I wrote a play once called 'Lobby Hero,' which I thought turned out very well, but there's no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.
‐‐ Kenneth Lonergan

I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo - a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money, and I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, 'I could do that.' And I said to my husband, I said, 'Ben, can I buy a banjo?' And he's like, 'No.'
‐‐ Mena Grabowski Trott