Writing Quotes - Page 352

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

The secret is to write just anything, to dare to write just anything, because when you write just anything, you begin to say what is important.

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

I love making movies. I love writing. I love acting. I love it, and I feel really blessed to be able to actually make a living with something I love doing.

I'm not singing anymore; that is why I am so pleased to be writing. My daughter said, "You just found a different way of using your voice."

Black child poverty is higher. As I write in the epilogue, "Yes we can. No he didn't. President [Barack] Obama didn't push black people backward, but he missed the opportunity to move us forward."

I think it's good when people don't write good things about your work. I mean, what a great compliment it is to be called a charlatan.

Writing the book was a pretty cool thing to go through, it really made me think of how crazy a journey it really was for this kid from Redwood City, Calif. When I was 12 years old, I was practicing my signature, but did I ever think I'd be a two-time Super Bowl champ, playing on arguably one of the best franchises of all time with the best quarterback of all time, for the best coach of all time?

To call that writing, madam, is an insult to quills and ink across the world.

As our economy faces up to potential labour shortages due to our ageing population and as it moves to a new level of sophistication to compete with the rest of the world, we're going to need every Australian on board pulling their weight, rejoining the workforce, gaining new skills. Writing off individuals and communities suffering from poverty just creates a dead weight for our economy to drag along.

Writing-and this is the big secret-wants to be written. Writing loves a writer the way God loves a true devotee. Writing will fill your heart if you let it. It will fill your pages and help to fill your life.

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move forward. It is a loop-an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight of the whole.

There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.

Sometimes I can't read my own handwriting. That's a problem!

I was sick all the time, one exotic illness after another, which lasted throughout my twenties. My worst decade. But from the day the first book was accepted, I never got sick again. Writing changed my life.

The best books come from someplace deep inside.... Become emotionally involved. If you don't care about your characters, your readers won't either.

Students think they must write down the idea immediately, but I tell them if it's a good idea it'll be in your head in five minutes' time.

I got that experience through dating dozens of men for six years after college, getting an entry level magazine job at 21, working in the fiction department at Good Housekeeping and then working as a fashion editor there as well as writing many articles for the magazine.

Writers don't write to inform other people, they write to find out something themselves.

You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, 'Your style just isn't right because you don't use the really flowery language that romances have.' My romances - compared to what's out there - are very strange, very odd, very different. And I think that's one of the reasons they're selling.

'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.

If somebody comes up to me, it's because they're moved by something I'm moved by. I've never taken a job I didn't love... So when somebody's coming up to me, or they're writing, they're in the same space I am in.