Writing Quotes - Page 686

I'm always thinking of stuff; I just don't sit down and write it. I come up with material more as I go along; if something funny happens, I'll make a note of it on my phone.

If something pops in my mind and it's easy, I write it.

It has been my fortune to love in general those men most who have thought most differently from me, on subjects wherein others pardon no discordance. I think I have no more right to be angry with a man, whose reason has followed up a process different from what mine has, and is satisfied with the result, than with one who has gone to Venice while I am at Siena, and who writes to me that he likes the place.

Authors are like cattle going to a fair: those of the same field can never move on without butting one another.

I can't write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred; also to choose such an opportunity for writing as it may be lawful to think what they will, and write what they think, which is a rare happiness of the time.

I think that computer programming shows in my writing. Often when I write about computer programmers I'll write about the way that they see the world and they structure the world.

The love of writing comes at a very early age. For me, for instance, comic books so affected me. And a lot of people who come up to me and start talking about writing, when I start talking to them about the "Fantastic Four," they look at me aghast. They say, "'The Fantastic Four?' That's not literature." I say, "Yeah, but it was when I was 11 years old." This was literature.

Your book grows. The early part of your book is growing still while you are writing the later part of your book.

The way I write is this: I write about a thousand words a day, a little bit more. The next morning, I read those thousand words and cursorily edit that. Then I write the next thousand. I do that all the way to the end of the book and then I reread the book quite a few times, editing as go through.

This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.

... We must remember that there's more than one story and plot in every novel. There are at least as many stories as there are main characters, and each of these stories has to have multiple plots to keep it going - blood and bone, nerve and tissue, forgotten longing and unknown events.

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream has excluded itself. No one told Jules Verne he was a science fiction writer, but he invented the 20th century.

All writing is that structure of revelation. There's something you want to find out. If you know everything up front in the beginning, you really don't need to read further if there's nothing else to find out.

My job is writing for people to enjoy and then writing about a broader and a deeper world.

I write every day and I just love doing it. It's just... it's just a wonderful thing. Some of my stories work, some of them don't work. Some of them are wild and I love them, but they certainly don't fit into any kind of a normal system that I know about.

One of the things that I love about being a writer is this. I wake up every day and I write for three hours. I wake up early. So like 6:00, 7:00 in the morning, I write till 9:00 or 10:00. I live in New York, nobody even is breathing until 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning. So, it's like my writing life is completely removed from the rest of my life.

One wouldn't want to say that what makes a good writer is the number of books that the writer wrote because you could write a whole number of bad books. Books that don't work, mediocre books, or there's a whole bunch of people in the pulp tradition who have done that. They just wrote... and actually they didn't write a whole bunch of books, they just wrote one book many times.

Purely the idea of writing a lot of books doesn't make you a great writer, but it might be that the process of doing a lot of writing will make you a much better writer.

It's fun to write about myself, but I feel like I would bore people with that.

I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing.

realized that at a level I'd never been conscious we'd been engaged in a game of wits for years. I suppose most writer-subject pairings are like that. Of course, I'd set aside my plan to write about him [Clark Rockfeller] as soon as I'd gotten to know him some, but now I'd resumed that intention.

Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.

I now have to find a reason to write, every single day.

I went to college, though I didn't take many writing courses.