Writing Quotes - Page 681

When I write, I love finding connections between ideas. When the connections are plentiful and strong, then I know it's a pretty good subject to write about.

It’s amazing how quickly something gets written. Now, when it comes, it can be on a bus, or in a store. I’ve stopped in Macy’s and written on a dry-goods counter and then suddenly had a whole piece of writing for myself that was accomplished, where earlier in my life I felt I had to spend a week in a house somewhere in the country in order to get that. Conditions change.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write…But this is life on earth, you can't have everything.

Maybe half a dozen think they are a community, but, in general terms, I think English writers tend to face outwards, away from each other, and write in their own patch, as it were.

I'm not a critic so much of my own writing. People must make up their own minds over that.

I probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, over the last few years I've been much more conscious of that. It's probably because my friend Jack Womack has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south.

It had also been my belief since I started writing fiction that science fiction is never really about the future. When science fiction is old, you can only read it as being pretty much about the moment in which it was written. But it seemed to me that the toolkit that science fiction had given me when I started working had become the toolkit of a kind of literary naturalism that could be applied to an inherently incredible present.

When I was first writing about Japan, it was at the peak of the Bubble. Bubble popped, but they kept on going. Japanese street style feeds American iconics back into America in somewhat the way English rock once fed American blues back into America.

I've been interested in autism since I've known about it, which is more or less since I've been writing.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.

When I start writing a new imaginary future, I have no idea what it is. The characters arrive first. They help me figure out where they are living and I get to fill in the gaps with that and where we are. So when I get to the end of the process of composition, if I feel that I have really done my job, I have no idea what I've got - and I then spend essentially the rest of my life figuring out what it might mean.

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.

I don't always like writing, but I very much like having written.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

Everything characters say or do is a clue to their personalities, their histories, and the forces that motivate them.

The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again.

'I never feel the need to discuss my work with anyone. No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don't need to talk about it. If it doesn't please me, talking about it won't improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer. I don't get any pleasure from talking shop.

It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.

I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.

That's a very good way to learn the craft of writing - from reading.

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers.

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.