Quotes on Writing

I have never heard a dancer asking for advice about how to stay focused on her footwork, or a painter complaining about the dull day-to-day task of painting. What task worth doing isn't worth daily effort? Do you think Michelangelo was having fun the whole time he was on his back painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling?

Some judge of authors' names, not works, and then Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men.

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn't enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they're not even very good.

A good science fiction story is a story with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its science content.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.

When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Teaching and writing, to me, is really just seduction; you go to where people are and you find something that they're interested in and you try and use that to convince them that they should be interested in what you have to say.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

If you're actually allowing your creative part to control your writing rather than a more commercial instinct or motive, then you'll find that all sorts of interesting things will bubble up to the surface.

Everybody has a cartoon of themselves. Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I'd worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read - if not indeed write - the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.