Quotes on Writing

I've written only two novels, but they're both long ones, and they each took a decade to write.

Pleasures First look from morning's window The rediscovered book Fascinated faces Snow, the change of the seasons The newspaper The dog Dialectics Showering, swimming Old music Comfortable shoes Comprehension New music Writing, planting Traveling Singing Being friendly

I sent American troops to Iraq to make its people free, not to make them American. Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.

Whenever you write, whatever you write, never make the mistake of assuming the audience is any less intelligent than you are.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once.

If you don't think there is magic in writing, you probably won't write anything magical.

It is the writer who might catch the imagination of young people, and plant a seed that will flower and come to fruition.

Our lives are songs; God write the words And we set them to music at pleasure; And the song grows glad, or sweet or sad, As we choose to fashion the measure.

The thing I try to get across to the writers - and I do a lot of writing, too - is that when I do stand-up, nothing I talk about is funny. Everything is really sad and tragic and then I make it funny.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How _x000D_ else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?

I never started from ideas but always from character.

When I stopped trying to write songs, that's when I'm able to begin writing songs. You have to just use your life, and the things around you for your inspiration.

I think that an author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

I've always preferred writing about grey characters and human characters. Whether they are giants or elves or dwarves, or whatever they are, they're still human, and the human heart is still in conflict with the self.

When you write, you lay out a line of words. _x000D_ Soon you find yourself deep in new territory.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of course, can do the same.