A Quote by Michael Scott

When it is going well, it is the best job [writing] in the world. For those few hours, you are god, in control of everything. However, for me, the great joy of writing is that it has allowed me to travel the world in search of stories.
It's an interesting job, it's a fascinating job, I can't imagine anything that would have given me more satisfaction, and not everything I did was awful, but it was just writing another story in a world that's full of stories.
I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.
The writing is - I'm free of pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing.
Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.
What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.
For me, writing stories set, well, wherever they're best set, is a form of cultural curiosity that is uniquely Scottish - we're famous for travelling in search of adventure.
If I'm writing about a modern-day suburb, there's going to be details of the home and furniture, and if I'm writing about a historical period, those details, those pieces of the world are going to be there as well, but they'll be simplified, because I'm cartooning it.
Part of what makes for good writing is an ear for what we would call the poetical. Poetry itself is another thing and it seems to me to be the most difficult writing - that those people are the best writers and they lead the way for everyone else and their writing is frighteningly great.
I think the book that really kind of woke me up a little bit when I was starting to write was 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson. I was in grad school at Brown, going for an M.A. in creative writing. Those stories seemed to me to be doing away with pretty writing.
Writing is not a job or activity. Nor do I sit at a desk writing for inspiration to strike. Writing is like a different kind of existence. In my life, for some of the time, I am in an alternative world, which I enter through day-dreaming or imagination. That world seems as real to me as the more tangible one of relationships and work, cars and taxes. I don't know that they're much different from each other.
I don't know where this thing about me being a travel writer comes from. It's nothing to do with me; I hate travel writing. I don't do it - I do it a little bit, but not much. I don't believe in it. I think it's over. The world is so saturated now that you don't need it.
If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.
One of the other reasons for writing this book [My Beloved World] was to hold on to the person you first met. More of the world knows about me now and follows me in a way that never happened before. I didn't want me, the inside of me, to change. Because I liked Sonia, the Sonia who has been. So another reason for writing the book was to hold on to that - whatever the best in Sonia was, to try to capture it.
Basketball has given me so many opportunities, and it's something that's opened the world to me and allowed me to travel really all over the world.
If you let anything infringe on your writing time, it will. And you won't get the writing done. Taking one day off can cost me five days of getting back in the mood. Going out to lunch can cost me anywhere from five hours to three days. And for me it's not worth it. For my own sense of well-being I have to finish my work before I can play.
For me, my stories are spiritual journeys, and whenever I write, it's a form of worship. It's a form of my worship. Worship is not just Sunday morning as we all know. Worship is everything we do. Writing is most definitely a form of worship for me and, God as I'm writing, He takes me on these journeys.
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