Make time to write every day. The writing muscle is like any other muscle; the more you exercise it, the stronger it becomes.
Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing.
Writing for adults and writing for young people is really not that different. As a reporter, I have always tried to write as clearly and simply as possible. I like clean, unadorned writing. So writing for a younger audience was largely an exercise in...
I paint very messy. I throw paint around. So when I let myself do the same sort of thing with my writing, and I would just write and write and write and revise, that's when I found my rhythm in writing.
Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grai...
Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do...
Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, e...
I write what's given me to write.
I don't write to be understood; I write to understand.
The thing I write will be the thing I write.
I write - and then I write some more.
I don't write stories, I write characters.
Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.
I don't write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.
What is the best way to write? Each of us has to discover her own way by writing. Writing teaches writing. No one can tell you your own secret.
I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. [...] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because h...
I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I w...
The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but they are not writing. You know, they really badly want to write a book but they are not writing it. The only advice I can give them is to just write it...
If I was on the road to Hell, at least I was going in style.
