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Writing Quotes
"I have a great book. It's called Stantasyland. Except I don't have the money to buy a million copies to put it on the bestsellers list."
20
"It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone, unless you collaborate, but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife."
20
"I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely."
19
"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."
19
"After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months."
18
"I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay."
18
"I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words."
18
"I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows."
18
"My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist."
18
"The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism."
17
"These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try."
17
"I did not think much what I was writing them for, except that I knew I wanted my next novel to be in some less conventional form than straight narrative."
17
"Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research."
17
"Beware of the compound adjective, beloved of the tyro and the 'poetess'."
17
"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."
17
"I've always written. There's a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother's papers were destroyed. I'd written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then."
17
"I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away."
16
"Writing is one of the few professions in which you can psychoanalyse yourself, get rid of hostilities and frustrations in public, and get paid for it."
16
"Sometimes I wish the writing and drawing were more integrated."
16
"In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels."
16
"Tech Jacket shares the same tone as Invincible, but the subject matter is very different. Where Invincible is about perfection, Tech Jacket is about flaws."
16
"Whenever I am sent a new book on the lively arts, the first thing I do is look for myself in the index."
16
"I think one of things is that all fantasy it seems to me works the way your brain basically works. This is perhaps a startling concept, but I think it's true."
16
"Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer."
15
"She would give them order. She would create constellations."
15
"Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult."
15
"When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it."
15
"Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite."
15
"I go to great lengths to make certain situations feel right to the reader."
15
"I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important."
15
"Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be."
15
"Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard."
15
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