Quotes on Writing

Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.

There is not some glorious theoretical synthesis of capitalism that you can write down in a book and follow. You have to grope your way

I've had some success at writing and directing, and I like it. It's infinitely more creative than just acting, and I have things I want to say and do.

Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there's an explosion-that's Plot.

I start to think, and then I sink_x000D_ _x000D_ Into the paper like I was ink_x000D_ _x000D_ When I'm writing, I'm trapped in between the lines_x000D_ _x000D_ I escape when I finish the rhyme.

Write your Sad times in Sand,_x000D_ _x000D_ Write your Good times in Stone.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.

I'm aware of the mystery around us, so I write about coincidences, premonitions, emotions, dreams, the power of nature, magic.

Before you go to bed, write down three 'gratefuls' for the day and three 'did wells' (they can even include something as simple as doing the laundry)-the results can be amazing!

O, how I faint when I of you do write, Knowing a better spirit doth use your name, And in the praise thereof spends all his might To make me tongue-tied speaking of your fame.

The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.

You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.

A transition from an author's book to his conversation is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur, and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

Congress shall have Power . . . to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Students of reading, writing and common arithmetick . . . Graecian [Greek], Roman, English and American history . . . should be rendered . . . worthy to receive, and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.

I consider it a good rule for letter-writing to leave unmentioned what the recipient already knows, and instead tell him something new.

A life that is worth writing at all is worth writing minutely.

A book is simply the container of an idea-like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.