Writing Quotes - Page 368

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

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.

Like any kind of writing, there are good days and frustrating days. But even frustrating days can be rewarding sometimes.

Generally, all my life, I have had strong friction with life - I was a problematic soldier, I was kicked out of the army, I was in fights. There was something about writing that was a way of experimenting with this emotion.

Writing a story is kind of like surfing, as opposed to the novel, where you use a GPS to get somewhere. With surfing, you kind of jump.

The books I'm writing are houses that I build for myself.

To become an American citizen, we require people to read, write and speak in English. That is to help them to assimilate in our melting pot, truly to become Americans. We mock that when the cherished right to vote does not involve English any more.

The road to Hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.

The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That's how you make it all of one piece.

All you need to do is write truly and not care about what the fate of it is.

My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.

The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing.

One writes not by will but by surrender.

Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

When we are very young, we tend to regard the ability to use a colon much as a budding pianist regards the ability to play with crossed hands: many of us, when we are older, regard it as a proof of literary skill, maturity, even of sophistication; and many; whether young, not so young, or old, employ it gauchely, haphazardly, or at best inconsistently.

Time for the FUTURE!! We will see young scientists in the future writing D++ (DNA Code).

Writing is a way to shape out visible and invisible, in myself as well as in the world.

I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran , asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, .. Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel.

It’s about time a 55-year-old British woman is the heroine of an action movie. I may have to write it.

I don't want to write things that people don't want to read. I would have no pleasure in producing something that sold 600 copies but that was considered very wonderful. I would prefer to sell 20,000 copies because the readers loved it. When I write books I don't actually think about the market in that way. I just tell myself the story. I don't think I'm talking to a 10-year-old boy or a six-year-old girl. I just write on the level the story seems to call for.

In the songs that I write, that's where I get to be really brave and outspoken.