Christopher Darden Quotes

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

I think I have sort of gravitated toward issues that I don't know the answers to, because that's what's more interesting for me to write.

I write for the same reason I read: to find out what's going to happen.

I feel that when I began writing, I had a need to know more about the play before I got into it. I think that's the way I was thinking. But my actual experience is that the best way to find out what the structure is, is by writing the play out laterally. You just have got to be brave enough to start without knowing where you are going.

I can create countries just as I can create the actions of my characters. That is why a lot of travel seems to me a waste of time.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

I write what I don't know. It's way more interesting.

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

I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about.

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.

Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don't learn about. It's constantly coming out of what I don't know rather than what I do know.

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.

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.

As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery.

Don't outline your stories. A lot of fiction workshops say you should. I say the opposite. I quote Grace Paley: "We write what we don't know we know."

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.