Quotes on Writing

I read about writers who have routines. They write at certain times of the day. I can't do that. I am always writing-but in my head.

American writers often say they find it difficult to write Superman. They say he's too powerful; you can't give him problems. But Superman is a metaphor. For me, Superman has the same problems we do, but on a Paul Bunyan scale. If Superman walks the dog, he walks it around the asteroid belt because it can fly in space. When Superman's relatives visit, they come from the 31st century and bring some hellish monster conqueror from the future. But it's still a story about your relatives visiting.

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop writing Introductions and get on with the book.

Just write. If you have to make a choice, if you say, 'Oh well, I'm going to put the writing away until my children are grown,' then you don't really want to be a writer. If you want to be a writer, you do your writing... If you don't do it, you probably don't want to be a writer, you just want to have written and be famous—which is very different.

A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in poetry, there was certainly no poetry in money, and so it was all even.

Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless...antique shops, clothes, hi-fi, etc. Don't say, don't write 'etc'. Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven't looked at anything, you've merely picked out what you've long ago picked out.

I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.... I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.

There is the myth that writing books for children is easier than writing books for grownups, whereas we know that truly great books for children are works of genius, whether it's 'Alice in Wonderland' or the 'Gruffalo' or 'Northern Lights.' When it's a great book, it's a great book, whether it's for children or not.

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live.

It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.

Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.

In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy, really, and loss.

Remember, it is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is a common occurrence in all writing, and among the best writers.

The surest way to arouse and hold the attention of the reader is by being specific, definitive, and concrete. The greatest writers - Homer, Dante, Shakespeare - are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.