Writing Quotes - Page 330

We either learn to accept or we end up writing letters home with crayons.

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.

I have never felt like I was creating anything. For me, writing is like walking through a desert and all at once, poking up through the hardpan, I see the top of a chimney. I know there's a house under there, and I'm pretty sure that I can dig it up if I want. That's how I feel. It's like the stories are already there. What they pay me for is the leap of faith that says: 'If I sit down and do this, everything will come out okay.'

What is writing? Writing is telepathy.

Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Rewrite formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%.

Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

I'm not a great deductive thinker, but I will admit to having competence in a very wide range of things - not being afraid to try to write about baseball, choral music and dinosaurs in the same week and see connections among them.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

Writing distills, crystallizes, and clarifies thought.

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.

When you can't draw chameleons and you can't draw blenders, it's a bad idea to write strips where chameleons become blenders.

I see but one rule: to be clear.

It's immoral that people make money out of writing crap, but I try not to obsess about it. I don't want to spend my life being angry.

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

If you go to a big city anywhere in the world and you need a doctor, just ask me. I can tell you who's good and who's bad. I've even considered writing a guidebook.

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.

Today, when we live in a what is called Western democracy here... you're not taken seriously all the time. You can write what you want because nobody cares about it. But at that time, they cared very much about what you wrote, so that's an entirely different feeling.

What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.

I would never write about anyone who is not at the end of his rope.

I will direct one day. I need some more life experience before I feel like I can do something like that comfortably. It'd be a feature, it'd be something maybe that I had in writing as well.

I'm a memoir writer. I try to understand the world by taking experiences I have and making them into a story, whether it's a narrative memoir, blogging for The Huffington Post, writing poems, or talking on the screen about what has happened to me and how that relates to the world at large.

I've always wanted to make music like people write plays, so I was inspired by writers as much as musicians.