Quotes on Writing

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

You can solve most of your writing problems if you stop after every sentence and ask: what does the reader need to know next?

Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

I write because I want more than one life; I insist on a wider selection. It's greed, plain and simple.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

Get into the scene late; get out of the scene early.

I write because it is while I'm writing that I feel most connected to why we're here. I write because silence is a heavy weight to carry. I write to remember. I write to heal. I write to let the air in. I write as a practice of listening.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings.

But, I don't think any arranger should ever write a drum part for a drummer because if a drummer can't create his own Interpretation of the chart and he plays everything that's written, he becomes mechanical; he has no freedom.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

It's hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news.

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practices on others

A student can win twelve letters at a university without learning how to write one.