Agatha Christie Quotes

If I thought that what I'm doing when I write is expressing myself, I'd junk the typewriter. Writing is a much more complicated activity that that.

In terms of the economics, yes obviously the rise of e-books and how people choose to read books has a big effect on the economics of the game. But whether people are buying them on paper or downloading them there's still some poor wretch in a room who is trying to write a poem, write a story, write a novel. And so my job doesn't change. It's just how people receive it and economic conditions on the ground change, but that doesn't affect what I write.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Writing is not some quiet, closet act.

Sometimes I look back and think, "How did I write that? The book is smarter than I am!" I have never written strategically, but rather, followed the dictates of my muse.

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general.

I write novels and other things.

Give me good writing, and I'll play it all day.

Big Night and The Impostors are both things that I wrote.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I'm pretty much writing all the time.

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

The first splurge of creativity is kind of free, and the last 30 percent is painstakingly hard work, but it's good to light a fire and make it public and create that expectation. It's become part of the writing process, really, a way to ask the audience what they think, how they think it's going. I can't write songs in a vacuum.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.

[On writing:] The most egotistic of occupations, and the most gratifying while it lasts.

Writing is like paying myself a formal visit.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

We writers don't really think about whether what we write is good or not. It's too much to worry about. We just put the words down, trying to get them right, operating by some inner sense of pitch and proportion, and from time to time, we stick the stuff in an envelope and ship it to an editor.