Georg C. Lichtenberg Quotes

You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts because if you write with someone looking over you shoulder, you'll never write.

I've never discussed my writing with others much, but I don't believe it can do any harm. I don't think that there's any risk that ideas or materials will evaporate.

Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense.

When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.

I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.

The great thing about writing is, if you don't like the world, we'll create a different one.

Throughout my life, there's just periods when I write and periods when I don't. I don't feel like anything's really blocked. "Writer's block" sounds so dramatic and worrisome, and I don't worry about it. I know deep down that I'm a writer, and it's just a matter of time until it comes back, and when it does, it'll be good like it's always been.

We just write down a bunch of words, and pray to god they make sense. And if we don't, it doesn't matter, we're artists.

The words are the important thing. Don't worry about tunes. Take a tune, sing high when they sing low, sing fast when they sing slow, and you've got a new tune.

The best I do, if I'm just playing around and riffing in a fantasy world, and then I'll write something down. Hopefully I write it down.

Too often, I think, children are required to write before they have anything to say. Teach them to think and read and talk without self-repression, and they will write because they cannot help it.

This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.

I’m an author. We don’t want to lead. We don’t need to follow. We stay home and make stuff up and write it down and send it out into the world, and get inside people’s heads. Perhaps we change the world and perhaps we don’t. We never know. We just make stuff up.

I don't care about my "impact" - I only care about the theater as an art form and criticism as an act of writing.

And it's just anathema to being a writer. It's not healthy. But in another way, when I'm writing, what it's about for me is being good on the page. None of that noise could change the way I feel about my writing. Which is not always particularly positive.

If you want to be a writer, all you need is a piece of paper and a pencil, and I had a manual typewriter. It doesn't cost money to write. It costs money to make art. So I would just write. I would hand out stories in the classes in high school. And the teacher would say, "Whatever you do, don't become a writer."

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.

I've quit writing screenplay [adaptations]. It's too much work. I don't look at writing a novel as work, because I only have to please myself. I have a good time sitting here by myself, thinking up situations and characters, getting them to talk - it's so satisfying. But screenwriting's different. You might think you're writing for yourself, but there are too many other people to please.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.

Something I always tell students is, when you're writing something, you want to write the first draft and you want it to come out easily in the beginning. If you're afraid to say what you really have to say, you stammer. [...] You're judging yourself, you know, thinking about your listener. You're not thinking about what you're saying. And that same thing happens when you write.

With my writing, I generally just pretend that no one's reading it. I allow myself that delusion so that I can write the things that I write.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.