For those who can do it and who keep their nerve, writing for a living still beats most real, grown-up jobs hands down.
You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.
Why do I love writing YA? Because I get a chance to re-live my youth knowing all I know now...
All we can do is write, but its up to the reader to decide if we wrote masterpieces or empty silliness, and there is nothing you can do till another reader says different.
Writing is like having sex. The people who never shut up about doing it are usually the ones who don't know what the hell they're doing.
The privilege is not writing a novel, it's to have someone read it. When you look at it that way, you realize the responsibility you have to put your very best on the page.
When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.
There are three difficulties in authorship: – to write anything worth publishing - to find honest men to publish it - and to get sensible men to read it. — Caleb C. Colton [1780-1832]
What one gains in technique can lead to deforestation in the writing that is both good and bad. Keep the energy and the willingness to proceed stupidly.
I think ‘slow writing’ is the answer when the feeling of burn out threatens, something akin to the ‘slow food’ movement. Anxiety and panic are counterproductive to the creative process.
The moment of writing is not an escape...it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.
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.
I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me.
When we start to write for a new record, we never really know what we're doing. We don't come into the room with a set of ideas, but miraculously, a song comes out of it.
I used to write bits and pieces of comedy material for various comics that were at the Windmill... as well as my film job, I was under contract, I was allowed to do that and everything.
Writing a story is like ruling the world. Except it's even better. How many rulers out there that you know can tell people what they say?
I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.
As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi
Dr. Johnson was a lazy learned man who liked to think and talk better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote.
