Writing Life Quotes

Life begins at 40. I could attempt writing. Life is taking me into different directions.

I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.

It was weird - writing is a stupid thing to do. I come up here in the morning to a pleasant room in the roof of my house and imagine I'm a black South American football superstar; then I have to imagine I'm a female pop celebrity who's pregnant. It's a completely mad way to spend your time.

Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.

I don't go to an office, so I write at home. I like to write in the morning, if possible; that's when my mind is freshest. I might write for a couple of hours, and then I head out to have lunch and read the paper. Then I write for a little bit longer if I can, then probably go to the library or make some phone calls. Every day is a little bit different. I'm not highly routinized, so I spend a lot of time wandering around New York City with my laptop in my bag, wondering where I'm going to end up next. It's a fairly idyllic life for someone who likes writing.

[Writing] totally changed my life. It gave me my life. Everything opened up.

Writing is a lonely way of life. You shut yourself up in your study and work and work.

I've always been a writer. I hope to continue to write books until I can't anymore.

Years of my life were lived knowing that I'd get a book out of them one day.

All through my writing life, I've had this impulse to write autobiographical works.

The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.

One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.

My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.

'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

On a personal basis, when I decided to become a writer, about the last reason I did it was because I thought I'd meet interesting people and make new friends. But that has turned out to be the very best part.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that's the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.