Writing Quotes - Page 152

I have to go with what comes naturally to me. Fantasy isn't my thing. I did enjoy the Oz books when I was growing up and certainly my grandson and I read Harry Potter together. You write what you can as well as you can.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

The central problem of novel-writing is causality.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

Sometimes, the best songs are the ones you write without any pen and paper or audio recording device or guitar in your hands. Because there's nothing between you and the melody; it's just a great lyric.

The skating community is very fickle. And with me, they're especially fickle for whatever reason. Maybe I bring it on myself, but if you don't prove yourself and you don't skate consistently, then they can very easily write you off and bring somebody from behind you and put them in your place.

A part of my kind of design and inspiration ethos is that I carry around a leather notebook and I sketch in it, doodle in it, write notes in it and I put pictures in it.

To finish is sadness to a writer — a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.

Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

By the time I got to the hospital, I certainly realised that I had a problem because I couldn't write or print at that time, which lasted luckily only about four months. I'd gone numb here and on my tongue and the right foot a little bit.

It is in the hard, hard rockpile labor of seeking to win, hold, or deserve a reader's interest that the pleasant agony of writing again comes in.

I go to restaurants and the groups always play "Yesterday." I even signed a guy's violin in Spain after he played us "Yesterday." He couldn't understand that I didn't write the song. But I guess he couldn't have gone from table to table playing "I Am The Walrus.

I write lyrics. I play the guitar. If the rest of the band had to do my schedule, they would be dead

I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.

Someday someone will write a pathology of experimental physics and bring to light all those swindles which subvert our reason, beguile our judgement and, what is worse, stand in the way of any practical progress. The phenomena must be freed once and for all from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism; they must be brought before the jury of man's common sense.

Thus we build on the ice, thus we write on the waves of the sea; the waves roaring pass away, the ice melts, and away goes our palace, like our thoughts.

I don't believe in writer's block. Think about it - when you were blocked in college and had to write a paper, didn't it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer's block is having too much time on your hands.

I was now ordered to have my writings copied, and put into the printer's hand.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

Writers are always selling somebody out.

My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.

Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.

My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?