top of page
"I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Creativity quotes

"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."

"It does not need to be perfect - or technically correct - to be magic."

"Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these - 'Chloe liked Olivia'. Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women."

"For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control. I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go."

"If you you write with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can."

"Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art."

"Often the inspiration to write music comes from the voices in your head. You're not crazy. Just be thankful they are not making you rescue people in 20-degree weather at 2:30 in the morning in the forest."

"The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth."

"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."

"I like working among 'creative clutter'. It gives me a sense of activity and achievement."
Explore more quotes by Robert B. Parker

"It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way."

"For David Parker and Daniel Parker, with the respect and admiration of their father, who grew up with them."

"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule. And send it in, and send it in to someone who can publish it or get it published. Don't send it to me. Don't show it to your spouse, or your significant other, or your parents, or somebody. They're not going to publish it."

"This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely."

"I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it."

"I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!"

"I think at this stage in my life I have learned that there are any number of things that men will never know, and can never hope to know, about women."

"College had little effect on me. I'd have been the same writer if I'd gone to MIT, except I'd have flunked out sooner."

"My older son who is, I think, here tonight, is forty-one years old. Which is odd because so am I."
bottom of page