Patti Smith Quotes

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

I should have asked for credit - but he has no idea how amazing it is that a character that was written as a boy can be equally written for a girl. It's like you said, just write a character as if it were a man, and then turn it and make it into a woman. It's like, we're human beings, after all.

A journal is a very personal thing. As far as possible, to write this sort of book you need to know and feel your character as a person and then put yourself into that person's mind, place and time. Trying to stay in that person, place and time is a challenge when surrounded by this very different world of the 21st century.

I am very gender-fluid and feel more like I wake up every day sort of gender neutral.

There are jobs that can be done equally well by men or by women and that finally you can't see a difference. But from the moment that you involve yourself fully in writing a novel, for example, or an essay, then you are involved as a woman, in the same way that you can't deny your nationality - you are French, you are a man, you are a woman... all this passes into the writing.

I do not consciously reclaim. I am not those "some readers" and so I think it would be impossible for me to see my work that way, as reclaiming a preserve. I write in a way that is aimed at all levels - conscious and unconscious - at pleasing the kind of reader I am. Some of the authors I read are male, some are female, and some are even in between. And speaking of in between, maybe now is as good a moment as any to point out that there might be no "feminine" or "masculine" literary sensibility, or sensibility generally.

when it comes to their essential faculty as writers, all writers are androgynous beings.

The goal is to be both disciplined and loose, so that the writing does not turn into a task or a chore. To leave myself behind, along with the mechanics, and disappear into the lives of my characters.

I always tend to like the characters that I play. I'm convinced that I am this person and I'm OK with whatever they do.

People just don't know how to write down a simple easy line. It's difficult for them; it's like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning - not many can do it.

There are moments when you have to write certain things and you don't have to think of your sex. If you are writing about the population of the thirteenth district in Paris, even if you are writing on the women in the thirteenth district, there's no need to consider your sex.

And there, in that phrase, the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love I would be another man; I would never have lost love.

I write four or five a books a year. That means that I usually have one on the go. I am fortunate in being able to write quickly - 1000 words an hour.

Writing isn't about the destination-writing is the journey that transforms the soul and gives meaning to all else.

Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.

You are a Virginian, and a Virginian ought to appear at the head of this business. I am obnoxious, suspected and unpopular; you are very much otherwise. And you can write ten times better than I can.

One can write out of love or hate. Hate tells one a great deal about a person. Love makes one become the person. Love, contrary to legend, is not half as blind, at least for writing purposes, as hate. Love can see the evil and not cease to be love. Hate cannot see the good and remain hate. The writer, writing out of hatred, will, thus, paint a far more partial picture than if he had written out of love.

Directing is genderless. The only thing...I love men.

I approach all of my movies with an open mind and a willingness to dive in and do what's asked of me.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

I remember reading a book set in the future, it was written in the 1870s projecting to 1920, and this time traveler said you couldn't tell the difference between men and women. He saw what was coming.

I think people are really starting to rebel against that. And I think there's going to be more and more gray areas. Hopefully that means we'll see more stories with characters that could be interchangeable with men.

Learn to write well, or not to write at all.