Writing Quotes - Page 967

When writing a novel, I'm not smart enough to know how to foreshadow something if I don't know what it is.

I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

There's no reason you should write any novel quickly.

I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it.

It's my experience that very few writers, young or old, are really seeking advice when they give out their work to be read. They want support; they want someone to say, "Good job."

When I finally write the first sentence, I want to know everything that happens, so that I am not inventing the story as I write it - rather, I am remembering a story that has already happened.

So, you see, it's a real chore for me to write a book review because it's like a contest. It's like I'm writing that book review for every bad book reviewer I've ever known and it's a way of saying [thrusts a middle finger into the air] this is how you ought to do it. I like to rub their noses in it.

When I feel like being a director, I write a novel.

Plot is a map and I begin with it. It is what made me admire the novels of the 19th century; that the stories are foreshadowed. TheyÕre going someplace.

Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.

The concept of writing a novel and not knowing where it's going - I don't know how to do that. Novels are plot- and character-driven, so if I don't know what becomes of people, how can I know where it should begin?

You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above.

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

I have a website because it's an interesting tool, very - and quite unexpectedly - useful for my work. It's become an archive and a fairly complete on-line portfolio, as well as offering an opportunity to write a little.

I think that by the time I start writing the third book, of course, I will be President Of The United States, and that also will have something to do with it. I'll probably have to acknowledge that somehow.

By the time I was writing the second book, my life had changed rather dramatically, thanks to the intervention of television, and I needed to find a way to discuss that. Otherwise the big, fake book would not be true on some level.

You know, I began my life as a creative person writing true things for magazines and telling some very honest, straightforward personal essaying for This American Life, but until someone forces you, with a deadline, to really observe your life - unless you're motivated to do it yourself - there's so many stories that you miss.

Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.

Writing for me always requires trickery. Tricking myself into sitting down, letting words tumble out until you find the good ones. It's sort of a trance. And when a piece is done, I have little memory of how I wrote it, and zero confidence I'd ever be able to do it again.

For a long time, I would write without music, because I thought it was distracting until I appreciated that it actually unlocks a certain unconscious productivity vault in my mind.

I thought of God as being able to talk big and write *very* small.

When the writing is really working, I think there is something like dreaming going on. I don't know how to draw the line between the conscious management of what you're doing and this state. . . . I would say that it's related to daydreaming. When I feel really engaged with a passage, I become so lost in it that I'm unaware of my real surroundings, totally involved in the pictures and sounds that that passage evokes.

For the last 20 years of my life, I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects, so I'm attracted to good story, writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.