All Quotes

Writing can't change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.
‐‐ Leslie Marmon Silko

Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.
‐‐ Jim Crace

Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
‐‐ Imre Kertesz

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
‐‐ Claire Tomalin

Writing chases after the senses, and conveys them in an altered form. When it is done well, the senses come alive in a new and captured form.
‐‐ Susan Minot

Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive.
‐‐ Helen Dunmore

Writing comedy is an exposing thing because you're putting yourself on the line with every joke you write, and although you can't second-guess an audience, if you want to be successful, you have to write stuff people like.
‐‐ Catherine Tate

Writing comes from that territory of being invalidated. But I had a sense of purpose, too. I wanted to stop apologising for my health, and I thought I might do some good.
‐‐ Hilary Mantel

Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.
‐‐ Sholem Asch

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
‐‐ John Updike

Writing crystallizes thought and thought produces action.
‐‐ Paul J. Meyer

Writing 'Deadpool' can be a lot of fun. When I first started working with the character, I wasn't sure I'd like him. I quickly realized, though, that a writer can do pretty much anything with him - comedic stories, serious stories, completely nonsensical stories.
‐‐ Cullen Bunn

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.
‐‐ Stieg Larsson

Writing, directing... anything behind the camera is what I want to do.
‐‐ Dylan Penn

Writing does change you, and of course it feels good to do things, so you could say writing is de facto therapeutic. But really, one writes to write.
‐‐ Deborah Eisenberg

Writing does produce a very unique satisfaction. There are times when I'm writing that it's frustrating or appalling or difficult, but when it goes well, it goes really well, and there is a feeling of rightness, like I'm doing the thing I was meant to do, almost in a mystical way, like I'm at an appropriate angle to the world.
‐‐ Rachel Kushner

Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult.
‐‐ Elizabeth David

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.
‐‐ Charles Frazier

Writing doesn't leave much time for hobbies, unless you consider that I began writing as a hobby and have made the hobby into a profession.
‐‐ Nelson DeMille

Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.
‐‐ Terry Brooks

Writing 'Fast Life' has been an incredible experience. It's something totally different from what I am used to.
‐‐ Joe Jonas

Writing 'February' made me realize that breaking form is a way of letting the song be human.
‐‐ Dar Williams

Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
‐‐ Gore Vidal

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.
‐‐ Eudora Welty

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.
‐‐ Alexander McCall Smith

Writing fiction is... an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it.
‐‐ Rose Wilder Lane

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.
‐‐ Joan Didion

Writing fiction is the 'job' I try to keep at the center of things. The movie stuff has been a wonderful accident, though not entirely bizarre, either, as I have done some work in film before, and even directed a ridiculous, cable-access feature back in my 20s.
‐‐ Jonathan Raymond

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.
‐‐ Buddy Ebsen

Writing fiction was a way to take the ideas that troubled me or confused me and put them under pressure.
‐‐ Phil Klay

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.
‐‐ Gurinder Chadha

Writing, film, sculpture, music: it's all make-believe, really.
‐‐ Kate Bush

Writing for a soap - writing for 25 characters day in, day out - is one of the most difficult jobs in Hollywood.
‐‐ Eric Braeden

Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in making my prose even more clear and direct, and in avoiding complicated digressions.
‐‐ Serge Schmemann

Writing for adults often means just increasing the swearing - but find an alternative to swearing and you've probably got a better line.
‐‐ Steven Moffat

Writing, for all that it's harder than nursing ever was, is also more joyous and more fun and a lot less dangerous. And the major themes of my life have become the major themes of my writing, too - so it has all worked out pretty well.
‐‐ Holly Lisle

Writing for children hadn't occurred to me when I was younger, but nine years of teaching in the upper elementary grades had given me a deep appreciation of the gifts and graces that are specific to individuals with 10 or 11 years of experience as human beings.
‐‐ Zilpha Keatley Snyder

Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.
‐‐ Enid Blyton

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
‐‐ Mark Haddon

Writing for children is my... that's my medium, you know, and the medium is the picture book, which is a very particular kind of book. I try to give children what I would give anybody, you know. I become interested in something. I find something fascinating. It has to fascinate me, and then I want to give it to them.
‐‐ Mordicai Gerstein

Writing for children isn't easy. Kids will abandon a story that doesn't interest, enchant, delight, thrill, or terrify them. But when you can find a way into a young reader's imagination through something as simple as words on paper, well, there's nothing more satisfying.
‐‐ Kate Klise

Writing for children, you do bear a responsibility to not include overt or graphic adult content that they are not ready for and don't need, or to address adult concepts or themes from an oblique angle or a child's limited viewpoint, with appropriate context, without being graphic or distressing.
‐‐ Garth Nix

Writing for me can be homework. I do get a lot from it in the end. But I hate doing it.
‐‐ Natalie Maines

Writing, for me, has always been a way of not having a career.
‐‐ Geoff Dyer

Writing, for me, is a very fluid process. I sit down and wait for the words to come. They usually do - in buckets and waves. I look upon it as a blessing because the words come so easily.
‐‐ Sharon Draper

Writing, for me, is an inherent part of understanding the material on a deeper level.
‐‐ Cary Fukunaga

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.
‐‐ James McBride

Writing for me is definitely a form of ventilation - a way for me to cope and deal with emotions. I think it is for any writer.
‐‐ Crystal Bowersox

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.
‐‐ Khaled Hosseini