Anne Stevenson Quotes

I don't like outlining, because books are organic things. Sometimes a book doesn't want to be written in a certain way.

There are many ways to go about a story. And if you give yourself some formal constraints, it just makes the job so much - maybe 'easier' isn't the right word, but because you know your boundaries, you can just play within those boundaries much more, so it's much more fun to do.

I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.

I don't know what the secret is when I am writing it - it really is a surprise to me.

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

Sometimes things just fall out of your head on the paper, and if you're smart, you learn not to touch them.

One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.

I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.

I don't set out to write something. I more just write, and later on, I discover what it's about.

I just make up lyrics off the top of my head. A lot of times, there's a phrase I really like, and I kind of build the song around that.

I don't really have a writing process. I don't write at all but, honestly, I feel like it's a modern-day writing because everything is technology and if I go in there and freestyle and I keep it, I feel like I wrote that. If I go in there and fix it, it's almost like something I wrote.

I don't know what I'm going to write when I begin to write. It feels like you are walking down a path, but you can't see around the bend and you don't know where you are going to go, which is fun.

I'm often just writing just to write. I'm not writing with...If I write, like, sitting down with a goal in mind, it's always, like, the worst. It turns into a ska song even if I'm trying to write like a horror movie sound track or something.

The only good writing is intuitive writing. It would be a big bore if you knew where it was going. It has to be exciting, instantaneous and it has to be a surprise. Then it all comes blurting out and it’s beautiful. I’ve had a sign by my typewriter for 25 years now which reads, ‘DON’T THINK!’

Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing... the rest will follow.

I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard. Writing became more like eavesdropping and less like inventing a nuclear bomb.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

It doesn't really matter who said it - it's so obviously true. Before you can write anything, you have to notice something.

When you write, don't say, "I'm going to write a poem." That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectation of yourself; say, "I am free to write the worst junk in the world."

Writing is the basis of all, because creating something that didn't even exist before is like taking an empty canvass. It is a wonderful thing to make something out of nothing. You've got an empty page, you've got an idea, and then you start typing and that is the most thrilling thing of all. And then if it becomes a movie or something else that's a plus, but the original writing of it is what's very exciting.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.