Henry Rollins Quotes

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

Since I grew up, I have never deliberately used any technique at all other than the physical shaping of my tale so that it more or less resembles what has been thought of as a novel for these last two hundred years.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

I used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.

I worked in script development, many years ago, and read a lot of scripts. Between that and the scripts I've read as an actor, and I'm a writer as well, I think I have a pretty good sense about whether the bones of a story are there and whether the structure is intact.

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

For the professional writer, stories must be presented as a series of individual scenes, each one dramatized with dialogue and telling descriptions of who is present and what they're all doing.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I've learned it doesn't get easier each time. It actually gets harder.

With screenplays and teleplays, they are mapped, really, in the blueprint of a finished product, which is something you're going to watch on a screen. But a book is an end to itself, really.

Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.

I fundamentally believe that no one can teach you how to write - finding out how to write a story is part of the process of creating a story - but you can really learn through exposure to different writing, to different art forms, to different modes of storytelling, and with mentors who are able to get you to step outside your comfort zone.

I never took creative writing.

The fact that I had spent so many years doing media criticism and thinking really seriously about theme and structure did definitely help. Doing that for several years indirectly built a lot of tools that I would end up using when writing my own fiction.

So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them.

Every film starts with the script.

I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.

My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.