Writing A Book Quotes

How do you make a living if you're writing a book?" Joshua asked. The boy was getting a bike for Christmas that's all there was to it.
David squirmed in his seat. "It doesn't pay anything yet."
"So, then what do you do to pay the bills?" Joshua asked. Forget the bike, he was getting a go-cart. ~ R.L. Mathewson

I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Writing a book and not publishing it, is like building a boat and never sailing it - UNTHINKABLE! ~ Tony Jones

This is apparently a little promotional ¶ where we're supposed to explain "how and why we came to" the subject of our GD series book (the stuff in quotations is the editor's words). The overall idea is to humanize the series and make the books and their subjects seem warmer and more accessible. So that people will be more apt to buy the books. I'm pretty sure this is how it works. The obvious objection to such promotional ¶s is that, if the books are any good at all, then the writers' interest and investment in their subjects will be so resoundingly obvious in the texts themselves that these little pseudo-intimate Why I Cared Enough About Transfinite Math and Where It Came From to Spend a Year Writing a Book About It blurblets are unnecessary; whereas, if the books aren't any good, it's hard to see how my telling somebody that as a child I used to cook up what amounted to simplistic versions of Zeno's Dichotomy and ruminate on them until I literally made myself sick, or that I once almost flunked a basic calc course and have seethed with dislike for conventional higher-math education ever since, or that the ontology and grammar of abstractions have always struck me as one of the most breathtaking problems in human consciousness - how any such stuff will help. The logic of this objection seems airtight to me. In fact, the only way the objection doesn't apply is if these ¶s are really nothing more than disguised ad copy, in which case I don't see why anyone reading them should ~ David Foster Wallace

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them. ~ Robert Crais

If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's okay to write. ~ Asne Seierstad

The ethic of ecstasy is the opposite of the trial's ethic; under its protection everybody does whatever he wants: now anyone can suck his thumb as he likes, from infancy to graduation, and it is a freedom no one will be willing to give up; look around you on the Metro; seated or standing, every single person has a finger in some orifice of his face-in the ear, in the mouth, in the nose; no one feels he's being observed, and everyone dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self, which is picking its nose; no one listens to anyone else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others. In this situation of uniform egocentricity, the sense of guilt does not play the role it once did; the tribunals still operate, but they are fascinated exclusively by the past; they see only the core of the century; they see only the generations that are old or dead. ~ Milan Kundera

When people climb a mountain, they don't stay there. They come back down and tell everyone they climbed a mountain. Writing a book is like that. If you write a book, you should tell everyone. ~ Bob Howard

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny. ~ Alain De Botton

Writing is a physical art. And writing a book is a lot more like making a complex sculpture out of bronze than writing a whole bunch of reports. What's in your head does not count, not for sculpture, not for book writing. Pencil on paper is what matters. Words on paper, pages and pages, chapter after chapter. ~ Heather Sellers

If I'm writing a book, and I'm warned, 'Oh, this is unsaleable, you need to make it shorter,' or, 'It has to be this, or that,' I'm proud to say I don't pay attention. ~ William T. Vollmann

What's the best part about writing a book?
Finishing it. ~ Rick Riordan

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing. ~ Norman Mailer

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence. ~ Annie Dillard

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. ~ Winston S. Churchill

If you're writing a book that takes place in New York in the moment, you can't not write about 9-11; you can't not integrate it. My main character's view is the Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center. It doesn't have to take over, but it has to be acknowledged. ~ Richard Price

When you're writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children's books. ~ Roald Dahl

The secret to writing a book is starting on page one and not stopping until you write the words "The End". ~ Bryan Koepke

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk. ~ Anthony Horowitz

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible, it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun. It's momentum, and once you get the momentum going, that's great, but it's a brutal experience in many, many ways. And when you're done, people tell you "Well, gee, I'm not interested." "Great, I'm glad I sat down and wrote this! ~ Lewis Black

Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally. ~ George Orwell

He had written this book only in the hope that she might get in touch with him. Writing a book, for him, was also a way of beaming a searchlight or sending out coded signals to certain people with whom he had lost touch. It was enough to scatter their names at random through the pages and wait until they finally produced news of themselves. ~ Patrick Modiano

There is no praise or criticism that is a reliable truth. Only the experience of writing a book is reliable. ~ R. Harlan Smith

La dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la première. (The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.) ~ Blaise Pascal

Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking.
It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day
to deliver your message with authority.
You should write one.
Seth Godin ~ Seth Godin

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story, ~ Elmore Leonard

If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Really, when I write a book I'm the only one I have to please. That's the beauty of writing a book instead of a screenplay. ~ Elmore Leonard

Good omelettes are still hard to come by. They shouldn't be made in a hurried or slapdash manner. Some thought has to go into an omelette. And a little love too. It's like writing a book - done much better with some feeling! ~ Ruskin Bond

Like a great ship, this season has run aground. Dawn and dusk alternate at an old man's pace. I live alone in an area known as the 'Waterside', writing a book akin to the Revelations of St. John. ~ Ge Fei

When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline. ~ Patti Smith

Playing a flute is like writing a book. You're telling what's in your heart ... It's easier to play if it's right from your heart. You get the tone, and the fingers will follow. ~ Eddie Cahill

She sat still, I thought, and yet she traveled. And when one stitches, the mind travels, not the way men do, with ax and oxen through the wilderness, but surely our traveling counted too, as motion. And I thought of the patience of the stitches. Writing a book, I thought, which men often do, but women only rarely, has the posture of sewing. One hand leads, and the other hand helps. And books, like quilts, are made, one word at a time, one stitch at a time. ~ Sena Jeter Naslund

Nobody's going to write a book about me, because nobody's going to find anything worth writing a book about. ~ Jack Kent Cooke

Focus on writing first. ~ Lyra Parish

It eventually appeared to be me, cinematically. When I was writing it I was actually an author, you know, writing a book ... But there certainly is a difference in energy between a younger man and an older man. ~ Steve Martin

A writer's place in a nation's literary history cannot be judged by whether or not he is capable of writing a book as heavy as a brick. That must rest on his contributions to the development and enrichment of that nation's language. ~ Mo Yan

I've heard rumors that the Petersons are writing a book. It will be very interesting to see what they have to say, but I don't know anything about the Rochas. ~ Catherine Crier

When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose. ~ Samuel Colbran

Writing a book is like raising a child, the only difference is you don't have the fucking part in writing a book. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

But for me to start the journey of writing a book about my life, the first place I had to re visit was my past. A book written from the deepest part of my heart as so many tears at times did fall upon the keyboard as I typed away. ~ Christian S. Simpson

Writing a book is just reading one, except you get to choose the perfect ending everytime! ~ Jennifer Squyres

A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out. ~ Ethan Canin

To write a book, we must write with our whole life, not just during the moments we are sitting at our desk. When writing a book or an article, we know that our words will affect many other people. We do not have the right just to express our own suffering if it brings suffering to others. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, like my father, were reluctant to talk about their experiences. ~ Cynthia Kadohata

But it is possible that a completely different author is somewhere writing a book about a UN Major Albert Knag, who is writing a book for his daughter Hilde. This book is about a certain Alberto Knox who suddenly begins to send humble philosophical lectures to Sophie Amundsen, 3 Clover Close. ~ Jostein Gaarder

When I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics. ~ Frank J. Tipler

I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it. ~ Hilaire Belloc

I'm not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I've written enough history books to know this isn't one. I'm writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?'
Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually - I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any. ~ Wallace Stegner

I am writing a book entitled "Conquest." Please be ready. It is a book children should red. ~ Charles Keith Hardman

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most. ~ Donald Miller

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work. ~ Thomas L. Dumm

Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own. ~ Caroline Kennedy

I believe that everybody needs to tell their story - to be heard, to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be understood. We all want that, deep down inside - and writing a book is a great way to make sense of your own experience and to share it with others. ~ Shakti Gawain

The process of writing a book is like the process of preparing a dinner. Serving dishes, choosing ingredients and so on. ~ Brian Tracy

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. ~ Anthony Horowitz

It's not so much less pressure, it's less work, which is really exciting to me. I'm just personally looking forward to being able to spend a little more time doing different things, so that's really great. Jay and I are writing a book this year which is really fun and so yeah, I am very excited to spend less crazy 12-hour days on set. Those were taxing times. ~ Mark Duplass

I've never actually even contemplated writing a book or having a book. ~ Rob Machado

I had the analysis of a million or so SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms] just to see what was there. That's partly because I was writing a book about DNA and personalized medicine and I thought it would be a little bit disingenuous to talk about what could be done without actually having the experiment done on yourself. ~ Francis Collins

It's the same thing in a way, although writing a book is a very solitary thing. ~ Neil Jordan

The trouble with calling a book a novel, well, it's not like I'm writing the same book all the time, but there is a continuity of my interests, so when I start writing a book, if I call it 'a novel,' it separates it from other books. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane. ~ Justin Halpern

Writing a book is a blood sport. If it doesn't hurt when you're done, you're probably doing something wrong. ~ Kevis Hendrickson

[Writing] books is really fun because your "voice" is pretty undiluted. There is a very direct connection between yourself and your audience. You will have an editor, but their job is to help you clarify or improve your voice, not change it. ~ Liz Tuccillo

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it. ~ Andrea Seigel

When you're writing a book that is going to be a narrative with characters and events, you're walking very close to fiction, since you're using some of the methods of fiction writing. You're lying, but some of the details may well come from your general recollection rather than from the particular scene. In the end it comes down to the readers. If they believe you, you're OK. A memoirist is really like any other con man; if he's convincing, he's home. If he isn't, it doesn't really matter whether it happened, he hasn't succeeded in making it feel convincing. ~ Samuel Hynes

The most difficult part of writing a book is not devising a plot which will captivate the reader. It's not developing characters the reader will have strong feelings for or against. It is not finding a setting which will take the reader to a place he or she as never been. It is not the research, whether in fiction or non-fiction. The most difficult task facing a writer is to find the voice in which to tell the story. ~ Randy Pausch

Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again. ~ Stephen Collins

When one is hungry, Princess, one is capable of anything ... even writing a book. ~ Odin Dupeyron

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories. ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

And then there is the black cat. Who has no other name than the Black Cat and who turned up almost a month ago. We did not realize he was going to be living here at first: he looked too well fed to be a stray, too old and jaunty to have been abandoned. He looked like a small panther, and he moved like a patch of night.

One day, in the summer, he was lurking about our ramshackle porch: eight or nine years old, at a guess, male, greenish-yellow of eye, very friendly, quite unperturbable. I assumed he belonged to a neighboring farmer or household.

I went away for a few weeks, to finish writing a book, and when I came home he was still on our porch, living in an old cat ben one of the children had found for him. He was, however, almost unrecognizable. Patches of fur had gone, and there were deep scratches on his gray skin. The tip of one ear was chewed away. There was a gash beneath one eye, s lice gone from one lip. He looked tired and thin. ~ Neil Gaiman

When you're writing a book, it's rather like going on a very long walk, across valleys and mountains and things, and you get the first view of what you see and you write it down. Then you walk a bit further, maybe up onto the top of a hill, and you see something else. Then you write that and you go on like that, day after day, getting different views of the same landscape really. The highest mountain on the walk is obviously the end of the book, because it's got to be the best view of all, when everything comes together and you can look back and see that everything you've done all ties up. But it's a very, very long, slow process. ~ Roald Dahl

As Frances had learned to do in times of uncertainty, she created a project over which she had total control and began writing a book "Dedicated to the memory of Irving Thalberg as a tribute to his vision and genius." How to Write and Sell Film Stories was written for "serious students of film technique." She filled the straightforward textbook with anecdotes from her films and others' to convey the lessons on the development of plot, motivation, and characters she had learned with Thalberg. She had come to believe that because of increased censorship and the limited number of adaptable plays and novels, "eighty percent of the motion pictures produced will be soon be stories written exclusively for the screen" and the time was right for a book on original screenplays. The audience for the book was immediate; universities ordered copies before it was published and it quickly went into several printings. The book led to her taking on an advice column on screen writing for Cinema Progress, a serious educational film magazine published by the American Institute of Cinematography based at the University of Southern California. She opened her house to roundtable discussions with students and sponsored a scenario contest with the winners serving as studio "apprentices. ~ Cari Beauchamp

Nothingness is everything to philosophers. If you wonder what everything is, then you also wonder what nothing is. The question is whether you can talk about it and still make sense. Heidegger thought that although being and nothing are not something, we nevertheless have a sense of them in moods like anxiety, joy and boredom. I'm writing a book about Heidegger, which means I'm writing about nothing. The good thing about nothing is that there's so much of it. Pretty much everywhere you go, there it is. ~ Taylor Carman

The most important thing about writing a book is having book parties. ~ Art Buchwald

I hear you don't write any more," he says ...
"Not true," I inform him. "You should see the margins of my student papers."
"Not the same as writing a book though, right?"
"Almost identical," I assure him. "Both go largely unread. ~ Richard Russo

The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people. ~ Berry Gordy

I never think about a movie when I'm writing a book, because I think only two things could happen and both of them are bad. You write a lousy novel and a lousy film. ~ Don Winslow

I think writing a book with film in mind is a way to write a really bad books. You can usually tell those books that are packaged to become films. ~ Charlize Theron

It's tempting to start each sentence with an apology or disclaimer. To preface everything with "In my life I've found" so that people can't yell at me for being wrong (I often am) or misinformed (sure) or overly emotional (HOW DARE YOU). ... That's one of the frightening things about writing a book that no one ever tells you. You have to pin down your thoughts and opinions and then they exist on a page, ungrowing, forever. ~ Jenny Lawson

Don't worry about writing a book or getting famous or making money. Just lead an interesting life. ~ Michael Morpurgo

Depending on each other and facing the difficulties that go with it takes a lot more effort than living on your own, separated from the rest of the world. Loving each other, hurting each other, over and over, until our death. All those things that seem so normal are actually incredibly difficult. To accomplish a normal life might be an achievement as great as writing a book that goes down in history! ~ Naoyuki Ochiai

It's the story of how I went from being lionized for helping bring the snipers to justice to being vilified for writing a book about it. ~ Charles A. Moose

I've been writing books without ego for a very long time. I feel like it will get what it deserves. Or won't get what it doesn't deserve. ~ Hilary Liftin

We never like to miss an opportunity to make Jesus the Lord of our life. That's why I never like to have a service without giving an invitation or writing a book, without giving an invitation and presenting that truth. I believe this is the whole key to living your best life, living a fulfilled life or becoming a better you. ~ Joel Osteen

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. ~ E.L. Doctorow

The most important thing to do when writing a book is to finish it. ~ Suzanna Reeves

I'm writing a book about Siamese Twins that are attached at the nose. It's called: Stop Staring at Me! ~ Zach Galifianakis

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the suffering too. All my life I have been suffering for words. Words have been the source of the pain and the way to heal. Struck as a child for talking, for speaking out of turn, for being out of my place. Struck as a grown woman for not knowing when to shut up, for not being willing to sacrifice words for desire. Struck by writing a book that disrupts. There are many ways to be hit. Pain is the price we pay to speak the truth. ~ Bell Hooks

Why would a guy spend five years writing a book when he can buy one for ten bucks? ~ Richard Johnson

I didn't originally intend on writing a book. I started writing during the day to feel like I was accomplishing something creative. ~ Rachel Dratch

The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way. ~ Stephen Rea

I've always wrestled with the difference between plot and structure, and after re-reading a lot of writing books I realized I wasn't alone. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

Writing a book, you can only get stopped by yourself. ~ S.J. Rozan

To be honest, I chose romance because writing a book seemed so dauntingly long. I looked around for something short, discovered Harlequin romances, and decided to read a few to see if I could do it. ~ Lori Wilde

Oliver North says he is very upset that John Walker could come back to this country and cash in on his celebrity status. He hates to see someone who did something wrong get rewarded by writing a book or getting a TV show out of it. ~ Jay Leno

I worked at magazines for over 10 years before I even thought of writing a book. ~ Dave Eggers

Don't ever trust anyone who's writing a book. They make up lies for a living. ~ Rosemary Clement-Moore

Writing a book is like pulling strands out of your soul, one by one, until one day instead of a mess it finally looks like a story. ~ Ksenia Anske