Robert Hayden Quotes

I don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as "truths" already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It's like any discovery job; you don't know what's going to happen until you try it.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.

The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.

True confession time: I never know where a book is going. I get a gut feeling the story is there, then pursue it with the enthusiasm of a hunting tiger on a trail. If I knew where I was going, I'd get bored out of my mind and stop writing.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

I don't have my novel outlined, and I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it over again.

You never know what you're going to end up with when you sit down to write something. At the end, if it holds, it can do this multifarious thing - which is to open things rather than close them, to make them bigger rather than smaller, to cross those divides which we live every day of our lives.

I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that's what we do. That's what storytellers do.

I kind of do all of this writing as a way of thinking and learning. I'm sure it's similar to being a journalist: You get to learn, and that's the greatest kind of job.

I just start writing, and in the process, one hopefully comes up with ideas and solutions and explores all the little nooks and crannies.

I've always loved both writing and songwriting. The journey is fascinating to me.

I think the most rewarding part for me is kind of not knowing where the story's going next, and then finding out and being blown away by it.

When writing 'Give and Take' and 'Originals,' the predominant emotion for me was curiosity.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

I don't know what I'm going to write when I begin to write. It feels like you are walking down a path, but you can't see around the bend and you don't know where you are going to go, which is fun.

When you're writing you're trying to find out something which you don't know.

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

So much of writing is discovery. Sometimes I feel like a rat in a maze, trying to discover the way out. My little heart is beating, and I'm racing down a path thinking, this is the route, it will get me there, as I turn this way and then that.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

Writing is the act of discovery.