Geraldine Brooks Quotes

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

I try to write 1,000 words. Some people say it's not about the quantity but about the quality. I disagree. You need to write a lot in order to figure out what's good and what's crap.

I often get asked how I write so much. As any writer knows, the answer is to write a lot more than you actually publish.

Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.

I write about eight hours a day, and I throw away most of what I write.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can.

The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day's work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.

I've always been a very prolific writer.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

Sometimes I'll be writing something, and I say to myself, 'Okay, that's definitely DTB,' or, 'It's definitely Strapping.'

No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.

I don't spend the day writing. I'll maybe write fresh copy for two hours, and then I'll go back and revise some of it and print what I like and then turn it off.

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

The process of rewriting is enjoyable, because you're not in that existential panic when you don't have a novel at all.

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.

The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

My writing is progressing slowly, but at least it's moving forward. I'm sure that's the case. The only problem is that I'm never absolutely certain that what I've written is any good.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

I don't want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of writing. It's rather like a pressure cooker with a certain amount of pressure in it - the more you let out, the less you cook.

The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.

I don't finish every story, but I probably write and send out three out of five of them.