Writing Quotes - Page 671

I love my work but do not know how I write it.

I stay away from the writing part because I think that if it sticks, it sticks. You just know it. The stuff that doesn't stick, goes away. The stuff that propels you forward, you can see it in your partner's eyes.

I'm a writer who never writes about sex. It's so far from my own fictional world.

I'm always interested in the way people speak and move in their environment, in a very particular environment. I'm never interested in writing a kind of neutral, universal novel that could be set anywhere. To me, the any novel is a local thing always.

Today, writing seems to me like an incredible luxury, almost a perversity, something which hardly exists in the world anymore, where you get to see the fruits of your actions in a daily way.

A lot of [George Saunders] early stories now feel prophetic. Take the recent election [of Donald Trump]. Historians in 100 years might write about it as being the first internet election, in which what happened was actually an expression in the real world of a virtual reality. And you've been writing about that subject for a while.

Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.

Other people’s words are so important. And then without warning they stop being important, along with all those words of yours that their words prompted you to write. Much of the excitement of a new novel lies in the repudiation of the one written before. Other people’s words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you’re going.

I'm most honest about writing when I'm talking to family or friends, not to newspapers.

And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.

I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.

I wouldn't write about people who are living and who are close to me, because I think it's a very violent thing to do to another person. And anytime I have done it, even in the disguise of fiction, the results have been horrific.

I just realized quite early on that I'm not going to be the type who can write a novel every two years. I think you need to feel an urgency about the act. Otherwise, when you read it, you feel no urgency, either. So I don't write unless I really feel I need to, and that's a luxury.

When I was young, I was very technical about these things. I didn't like to admit to any intimate relation with what I was writing.

First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

It seems to me now that the deep structures [in writing] are often subconscious and set in childhood.

It’s such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

Every genuinely literary style, from the high authorial voice to Foster Wallace and his footnotes-within-footnotes, requires the reader to see the world from somewhere in particular, or from many places. So every novelist's literary style is nothing less than an ethical strategy - it's always an attempt to get the reader to care about people who are not the same as he or she is.

Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision. I love that aspect of writing. Nothing makes me happier than to hear a reader say: that’s just what I’ve always felt, but you said it clearly.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

[Writing something original from scratch], the initial process is way different. But once it exists and you start to actually work on making it real, then the approach is kind of the same, for me anyways.

In the Making Of book ["300"] there's a guy named Victor Davis Hanson who is a a frickin genius. He's a Greek historian and we showed him the movie because I wanted him to write a forward to the Making Of book. I was a little nervous to be honest, because I wasn't sure how he'd react.

We [with Neal Dodson and Corey Moosa] spent a lot of time writing, for lack of a better word, this manifesto about what we wanted to do. We wanted to find work that was relevant socially and that didn't take audiences for granted.

What's invaluable about actually going to the places you want to write about are the random accidental things that happen. Random, accidental detail is the best way to make a setting convincing. You can of course invent your own random details, and sometimes I will also mash up real incidents.

In hindsight, I must have been looking for a way to write about Jewishness that somehow managed to minimize irony and self-deprecation.