Don DeLillo Quotes

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.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

Writing's another expression of art, really, that I'm just kind of discovering as I go.

I think that it's worthwhile to explore the ways in which you write the person that's writing your plays as opposed to simply assuming that it's all a natural process and there's no design in it. Because your public persona is designed, to a certain extent, and you can have fun and profit at various times doing that.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

Writing is a subtle art that is reached mostly by self-discovery and experimentation.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Thinking visually is my starting point, and then the writing happens.

Writing is the act of discovery.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

Literally, I see my writing as transcription - a transcription of what I see, hear, think, live.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.

As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that's up to you. But - and I wish it were otherwise - books don't get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that's when you make discoveries about what you're writing. That's when you get the happy accidents.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

For me, writing is more a process of discovering the book than planning it.

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

To a certain extent, just like my children, I nurture my writing until the point when it has to get out and face the outside world, where it takes on a life of its own. That is a purpose of any artist and their art.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.