Quotes on Writing

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world.

This is the first teaching of the Knights: You will erase everything you had written in the book of your life up until now: restlessness, uncertainty, lies. And in the place of all this you will write the word courage.

If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its _x000D_ laws. Today, television tells most of the stories to most of the people _x000D_ most of the time.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

My eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Pabst, had done her master's thesis on Tolkien. She showed me how the trilogy was patterned after Norse mythology. She was also the first person to encourage me to submit stories for publication. The idea of writing a fantasy based on myths never left me, and many years later, this would lead me to write Percy Jackson.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it . Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails.

How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen.

An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.

Bring forward what is true, Write it so that it is clear, Defend it to your last breath!

One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

The art of the novel is to arrive at that artless point where your characters become more real than yourself.

Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description.

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

I don't want the reader to be aware of me as the writer.

Never be afraid to make a fool of yourself. The furthest out you can go is the best place to be.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

Say what you mean. Say what you see. Make a photograph, if you can, for the reader.