Writing Quotes - Page 658

Love is the main generator of all good writing... Love, passion, compassion, are all welded together.

One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective.... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero.

The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy The books that people talk about we never can recall And the books that people give us, oh, they're the worst of all.

When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.

Women, I believe, search for fellow beings who have faced similar struggles, conveyed them in ways a reader can transform into her own life, confirmed desires the reader had hardly acknowledge-desires that now seem possible. Women catch courage from the women whose lives and writings they read, and women call the bearer of that courage friend. [p. 138]

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality.

The writing process is sort of like when you've got no electricity and you've gotten up in the middle of the night to find the bathroom, feeling your way along in the dark. I can't hardly tell you what I do because I really don't know.

Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy that kind of process.

What I do when I write is I just write the way I would tell it, so it comes out just exactly the way I would talk to you.

I am a night creature, and I write from midnight till dawn, secluded in my office and surrounded by my collection of dragons (I have 400 of them). I only use Macintosh computers, which I name in dynastic order. Right now I'm using MacDragon 5. Only the devil is able to decipher my handwriting.

I knew when I was writing The Angel's Game that a lot of people would be upset that I didn't write Shadow Of The Wind 2. That's okay, that's part of the game. You do what you have to do. If they like it, great. If they don't, too bad. What are you going to do?

Write," he said. "I'll write to you as soon as I get there," answered Julian. "No. Not to me. Write books. Not letters. Write them for me, for Penelope.

I quarreled with every word, every phrase and expression, every image and letter as if they were the last I was ever going to write. I wrote and rewrote every line as if my life depended on it, and then rewrote it again.

Human nature provides the lyrics, and we novelists just compose the music.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

To read and write is a paradise.

In literature, you know only what you imagine

I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.

I don't think you can ever regain your ignorance.

When I was writing Razor Girl, I thought it would be fun to have a redneck TV family that was really just a bunch of actors who had to be trained to be rednecks. That's not so farfetched, if you know how Hollywood works.

But this same process of the old teaching the young can also cause errors and false conclusions to accumulate with the passage of time. One should therefore study ancient writings, not so much in the hope of finding lost wisdom as in the hope of locating the origin of errors that have been, and still are, accepted truths.

I started writing about New York as soon as I arrived. I was 19. I used to write short stories and send them out.

When it comes to people -- don't write about who you know; but what you know of human nature.

For me, having it all is being paid to write novels.