Writing-process Quotes

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg adress was so short. The laws of prose writing are immutab...

You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.

Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.

I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everyt...

Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He ...

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing...

So much of a novelist’s writing … takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is w...

Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishi...

Starting your book is only the first five miles of a twenty-six-mile marathon that’s one-third of a ...

Writingis therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.The process of...

A successful self-publisher must fill three roles: Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur—or APE.

I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behi...

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath...

People on the outside think there’s something magical about writing…

A short story I have written long ago would barge into my house in the middle of the night, shake me...

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I...

No matter how much enthusiasm and effort you put into writing, if you totally lack literary talent y...

I do not distinguish between the construction of a book and that of a painting and I always proceed ...

Half the fun of writing a novel is finding out from other people later on what you actually meant.

In the seventies I used to work in the bedroom of my flat at a little table. I worked in longhand wi...

You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily...

think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business d...

Creating a novel means moving into the past, the hoped for, the imagined. It is an emotional journey...

His world was small, an illiterate county seat, a backward state, though from it he fashioned someth...

Eating words and listening to them rumbling in the gut is how a writer learns the acid and alkali of...

A writer has no use for the clock. A writer lives in an infinity of days, time without end, ploughed...

You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

I do not plan my fiction any more than I normally plan woodland walks; I follow the path that seems ...

Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a ...

Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer —not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but becau...

When you are writing, you must treat it as the most important thing in the world, even when you know...

Whether pleasant or dismal, the past is always a safe territory, if only because it is already exper...

I just thought, ‘Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place...

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to trans...

I do not put in long hours at the keys - or very seldom. Instead, I snatch time. I write in the cran...

Once writing becomes an act of listening instead of an act of speech, a great deal of the ego goes o...

When we make time to write, we can do it anytime, anywhere.

Just as a good rain clears the air, a good writing day clears the psyche.

Grab for time to write instead of wait for time.

If we eliminate the word "writer", if we just go back to writing as an act of listening and naming w...

I believe that what we want to write wants to be written

The "if I had time" lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and...

Writing is a way not only to metabolize life but to alchemize it as well. It is a way to transform w...

The trick to finding writing time is to make writing time in the life you've already got.

Owning something also means owning up to something. It means accepting responsibility, which means, ...

Being in the mood to write, like being in the mood to make love, is a luxury that isn't necessary in...

When we write from the inside out rather than the outside in, when we write about what most concerns...

The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy g...

It's basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes...

Science fiction invites the writer to grandly explore alternative worlds and pose questions about me...

Anytime you write something, you go through so many phases. You go through the I’m a Fraud phase. Yo...

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you wer...

Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and "fall into a ...

In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain ad...

A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the ...

If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will.

The time to being writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time...

The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say.

A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a...

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought co...

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They ...

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a write...

The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new...

The farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources.

I had taken up my quill to begin writing many times before now, but I always abandoned it quickly: e...

A novelist is essentially a person who covers distance through his patience, slowly, like an ant. A ...

To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we...

My mood, as I identify with each of my heroes, resembles what I used to feel when I played alone as ...

Stories are invented as you go along...

When I am writing a novel, the setting, the characters, the action is clear in mind when I start -- ...

I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go o...

Writing means sharing. It's part of the human condition to want to share things - thoughts, ideas, o...

Also, I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue--the clue--lies there. I'm always ferreting out e...

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look a...

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper...

In quickness is truth. The more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought...

I would write:"The soft melting hunk of butter trickled in gold down the stringy grooves of the spli...

There should be more or less of a jumble in your head or on your note paper after the first time and...

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without pri...

Once they got into the idea of seeing directly for themselves they also saw there was no limit to th...

He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity...

When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all...

Steven wrote to me today, saying, 'Don't you feel like sticking your head out of the window and yell...

Maybe that's when bad scripts are written, when you choose the theme first. I consider that I've som...

In a very real way, one writes a story to find out what happens in it. Before it is written it sits ...

Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at ...

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at ...

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at ...

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at ...

Forget ideas, Mr. Author. What kind of pen do you use?

When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you j...

The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a sea...

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you're writing,...

I think you will find that, if you continue to write fiction, every character you create is partly y...

Writing is the act of finding out what I think.

I gradually realized that I was seeing another example of creative ebb, another step by another art ...

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.