Literary Work Quotes

'Floating Worlds,' which received a fair amount of attention when it was first published, deserves rediscovery.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

I write a thousand words a day.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

'The Dovekeepers' is a fantastic novel written by Alice Hoffman; it was a bestselling novel, and I fell in love with the book and bought the rights to it.

I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.

On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to - I mean, writing is a lonely business.

I spend about a year between novels.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

For I begin with writing the first sentence, — and trusting to Almighty God for the second.

I remember a passage in Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield," which he was afterwards fool enough to expunge: "I do not love a man who is zealous for nothing.

I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

I am a writer - that is what I am before being a performer or musician. I love waking up in the morning and then going to sleep that night with something that did not exist.

I'm always working on my next novel, even when I'm not.

Start writing the things that you are reading or that you want to be published doing.

You shouldn't think of these movies as being 'The Lord of the Rings.' The Lord of the Rings is, and always will be, a wonderful book - one of the greatest ever written. Any films will only ever be an INTERPRETATION of the book. In this case my interpretation.

I am writing a book and that takes third place of importance.

I think the books are the books. They were conceived as books. They weren't conceived as movies. When I write scripts, that's an idea and a situation that I think is a really good idea for a movie. When I'm writing a book, I'm not thinking, "Oh, this would be a great movie." This would be a very interesting book. And I think the books are things that cannot really be adapted into another medium.