Writing Quotes

People do tell a writer things that they don't tell others. I don't know why, unless it is that having read one or two of his books they feel on peculiarly intimate terms with him; or it may be that they dramatize themselves and, seeing themselves as it were as characters in a novel, are ready to be as open with him as they imagine the characters of his invention are.

An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

Even writers need relief from words.

A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

Journalism is just a gun. It's only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that's all you need. Aim it right and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

When you write things down, they sometimes take you places you hadn't planned.

No letter from a lover is ever more welcome, brings more joy, than a publisher's expression of interest does to a new author!

Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell.

She was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story.

I have never thought of writing as hard work, but I have worked hard to find a voice.

You can't think yourself out of a writing block, you have to write yourself out of a thinking block.

Stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long.

There is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.

You have a choice in this world, I believe, about how to tell sad stories.

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.

I'm the least confident person in so many ways. But I believed that if somebody gave me the chance to tell a story, I would tell a story [well enough] that the person who gave me the chance would get their money back.

You go to movies to see people you love suffer - that's why you go to the movies. You don't go to see a movie about a guy who already knows he has a wonderful life.

I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn't end, I'll go to a French movie. A movie has to be complete within itself; it can't just build off the first one or play variations.