Top 1200 Writing A Book Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'

I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.

Time spent researching varies from book to book. Some novels require months, even years of research, others very little. I try to do most of my research before I begin but inevitably questions emerge during the writing.

The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time. I don't do too many notes. I keep it mostly in my head. I usually start writing a new book around January, and it's due October 1.

If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is.

I think there's a difference between having a bestselling book - meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers - and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list.

I wrote a book called 'Doll Bones', which was another middle-grade book, and when I was writing it, I needed a place in the U.S. that made bone china. And there are only two places in the U.S. that make bone china. They made it by grinding down actual cow bones. It was a plot point. It was a creepy doll book.

I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80,000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

Writing has certain advantages; film is another way to tell a story. An experienced filmmaker will take what she needs from the book and leave out other things. With adaptations, you never get the texture of the writing: it's a different mode.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

The second book, which was probably more from a professional standpoint - when I read Junot Díaz's Drown, I was like, Oh my god, you can write these stories and people will actually read them beyond your own little community. This guy's book is blowing up and it seems like [he's writing about] the neighborhood that I grew up in. That was a big deal. I read that in graduate school, so that's when I was really taking writing seriously, but I didn't know you could do it. I didn't know you can actually be an author. It was a weird epiphany.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

There really is no difference in the actual writing or plotting. I choose to tell different stories for the younger reader and, of course, I would never put sex and extreme violence in a YA book. But writing for adults and children requires the same care and attention.

I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.

The biggest idea that I have learned - I basically went in to write a book about Adam and Eve, ended up writing a book about love. And what did I learn? Love is a story you tell with another person.

For screenwriting, when you're writing, you're talking to hundreds - hundreds of people who might be interpreting what you're saying. When you're writing a comic book, you're really only talking to the artist.

Yeah, and the language the "we" has, and the character the "we" has. Because that was the part of the book that I didn't plan out, but the part that I was most curious about as I was writing. You know what you're doing, but you're sometimes still sort of curious as you're writing it.

I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.

A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.

I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.

I'm not writing necessarily for an audience. I think about the audience at the end, once I have a complete book. But, when I'm writing it, I really need to feel like I'm learning, and I'm investigating something that I'm personally interested in.

Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.

I don't look at it as writing a book in a videogame universe. I look at it as writing for 'Halo', which for me, transcends being just a great video game. It's evolving into a whole new mythology.

I have a number of friends that try to live off their writing, and there's way more pressure for a hit or to write a certain type of book. You can't do a limited-edition short-story book with drawings unless you don't want to eat anything but ramen.

I'm still happy with the way Einstein's Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words. That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don't think it could happen with a long book.

It wasn't until after college that I started writing. I had just applied randomly for jobs in the media and got one on a magazine called 'Pensions World.' So I was writing for a living there and that's when I started my first book.

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.

You will want a book which contains not man's thoughts, but God's - not a book that may amuse you, but a book that can save you - not even a book that can instruct you, but a book on which you can venture an eternity - not only a book which can give relief to your spirit, but redemption to your soul - a book which contains salvation, and conveys it to you, one which shall at once be the Saviour's book and the sinner's.

I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, A picture book is the essence of an experience.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

I've only suffered writer's block badly once, and that was during the writing of Chamber of Secrets. I had my first burst of publicity about the first book and it paralysed me. I was scared the second book wouldn't measure up, but I got through it!

When I wrote about media and technology, I had a lot of lonely, even intimate book talks. Since writing about dogs, I have a lot of company at book signings.

I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.

If you are writing any book about the end of the world, what you are really writing about is what's worth saving about it.

Since 1988, I have been writing steadily. I did decide a couple of years or so ago to scale back to writing one book a year - a sort of semi-retirement. But I never did have much success with that plan!

I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

Writing this book feels like a completely different activity from writing my comic strip because it's about real life. I feel like I'm using a part of my brain that's been dormant until now.

Write what you want to read. So many people think they need to write a particular kind of book, or imitate a successful style, in order to be published. I've known people who felt they had to model their book on existing blockbusters, or write in a genre that's supposed to be "hot right now" in order to get agents and publishers interested. But if you're writing in a genre you don't like, or modeling yourself on a book you don't respect, it'll show through. You're your first, most important reader, so write the book that reader really wants to read.

I've always had a foot in everything. As a kid, I was active in sports and theater. Now, I'm learning I have to focus a bit. I'm trying to get to next projects, like writing a screenplay. Once that comes together, I could put my mind to another book - maybe a fun kids' book.

For me,the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out-the writing down of it I always find hard.But I love finishing it,then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers.

When I first read 'At Freddie's', I was struggling with my own writing, particularly with how to write about a sad subject - the death of a parent - without writing an entirely sad book.

I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.

Writing is a bit like swimming. You learn writing by doing it and you learn swimming by doing it. Nobody learns how to swim by reading a book about swimming and nobody learns how to write by reading a book about writing. If you want to learn how to write, write a lot and you will get better at it.

During the first five years that I was writing the series, I made plans and wrote small pieces of all the books. I concentrate on one book at a time, though occasionally I will get an idea for a future book and scribble it down for future reference.

I'd never written nonfiction about the war on drugs, but I know a tremendous amount about it: I taught a class on it for seven years. I was putting into words the stuff I was teaching, and I was writing it up and thought, "Dude, you're writing a book."

I am very bad at remembering the books I've read and so recently I had a wonderful experience. I decided I wanted to teach Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. I hadn't read it in twenty-five years. I was surprised to find how much I drew from that book. Stole from that book, learned from that book about writing. I had forgotten and there it was. Morrison has called that text faulted. I cannot see how.

THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.

Don't be afraid to fail. I fail every day. I failed thousands of times writing The Book Thief, and that book now means everything to me. I had many doubts and fears about that book, but some of what I feel are the best ideas in it came to me when I was working away for apparently no result. Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.

With 'Interpreter,' I didn't know it was ever going to be a book, that they were going to be published. I was writing them in a vacuum for the most part. They were my apprentice work. Then the stories happened to become a book.

When you write your first book, you're writing in a vacuum; it doesn't matter how much time it takes. And then with the second book, you're on contract, and you have deadlines, and it's a little bit tougher. And also the expectations. You don't want to let your characters down.

That's one of the many things about having the bookstore that I adore. I can walk into the store and say to somebody, "I'm glad you're reading this book" or "I'm glad you're getting this book" or "Don't get that book. I read that book and hated that book. Let's get you this book instead."

When I started writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I was trying to write the type of book you might enjoy, put back on your shelf, and rediscover a few years later. I hope that the book finds its way into the bathroom of every kid in America.

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and trying to rewrite it.

The best writing advice I ever got was "Keep moving forward, don't retreat into rewrites." The worst came from a book that said "Writing fiction is like telling lies," which just seems stupid to me.

I spent seven years writing The Free World. There are a lot of things I accomplished there that I'm very proud of, but I didn't want to spend another seven years writing a book like that.

I think you get so wrapped up in the book you're currently writing, it's hard to think about anything else. But I know as soon as I'm done with this book, I'll move on to something else.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now.