Quotes About Writing Books

#1. As I inch forward to embrace my life again by being mindful, writing books, and planning adventures, I sense my dad would approve. I know he would want me to be happy.

Lisa J. Shultz

#2. And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.

Bernard Cornwell

#3. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.

Caroline Kennedy

#4. I certainly wouldn't be writing books if it hadn't been for the feminist blogosphere, and I think that's a really amazing thing.

Jessica Valenti

#5. In mid-career, I was at one and the same time the rabbi of a major congregation, writing books, and teaching at Columbia. I didn't spend enough time with my children. Now, when I get an all-important call, I sometimes say that I'm having lunch with my granddaughter. And I do not apologize

Arthur Hertzberg

#6. I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

Donald Miller

#7. I have never been depressed or thrown a plate, which I attribute to the cathartic effects of writing books about people whose lives are more grueling than mine.

Emma Donoghue

#8. I don't think many of us launched ourselves into the world of writing books fully formed.

Val McDermid

#9. I like writing books. I'd rather be at home with my wife. I can write, take a break, come out, have a glass of tea, give my wife a kiss, and go back in and write some more. It's not so bad. I am really lucky.

Gene Wilder

#10. Half hating, half loving, this free time between writing books.

K.J. Mecklenfeld

#11. Some things go better than you expected, other things go worse, so I'm ... I think the only sensible thing is just to wait and see and what I'm doing when I'm writing books - I'm not doing science so much anymore.

Freeman Dyson

#12. Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.

Rick Yancey

#13. I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.

Julian Barnes

#14. We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.

Alexander Kluge

#15. But that's fetishism, I think, writing books to write books.

Kurt Vonnegut

#16. I don't know how old I was when I started writing books. But, I was born in 1931, and I wrote my first book in 1961.

Ed Emberley

#17. I remember all the way back in high school thinking about writing books. And, in fact, I've written a lot of stories. I've got dozens of stories I've written that no one's ever seen.

Patrick Carman

#18. Writing books is certainly a most unpleasant occupation. It is lonesome, unsanitary, and maddening. Many authors go crazy.

H.L. Mencken

#19. I've never really thought of writing books. I've never thought about stories as a part of a collection.

Deborah Eisenberg

#20. I'm clearly most well known for my music. Eventually, ultimately, I'll be writing books. I'm still writing articles now. I just consider myself a writer.

Alanis Morissette

#21. I've spent most of my life trying to wear a persona that didn't quite fit and when I started writing books, it was like finally becoming the right person.

Meg Rosoff

#22. I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'

Carine Roitfeld

#23. I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.

Jerry Spinelli

#24. Writing books is one of the ways that human beings deal with loss, especially when you don't have religious consolation available.

Marco Roth

#25. Really, I don't like to do any household chores. There was a time when I loved to cook, but that was when I wasn't writing books.

Elaine Pagels

#26. People ask me, 'Why are you still writing books?' Like I'm still only writing to make money and as soon as I have enough I'll quit and go fishing? I like to write books. It's the most satisfying thing I do.

Elmore Leonard

#27. While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

Rick Perlstein

#28. I suffer from the disease of writing books and being ashamed of them when they are finished.

Baron De Montesquieu

#29. Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.

Derek Bok

#30. I am drawn to writing books about magic and the supernatural because those are the types of books I like to read. I've written many short stories with realistic settings, and I certainly wouldn't rule out realistic novels in the future!

Cassandra Clare

#31. Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.

Norman Mailer

#32. Other people are talking about writing books about my life, or about some of the things I've done. I find it strange, but I also feel it's my life and my story, and I guess I better be the one to get it on paper the way it actually happened.

Chris Kyle

#33. Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

Willa Cather

#34. But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.

Edward Abbey

#35. I've been writing since I'm five years old. I've been writing books since high school - junior high, high school. I write every single day. I never thought I'd be published.

Karrine Steffans

#36. This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.

Philip Pullman

#37. There are other types of public appearances a writer does in addition to book signings and readings. Each calls for different skills. None of these skills, needless to say, are those that go into writing books.

Jane Lindskold

#38. Why am I writing books in my old age? Who am I trying to impress? Why go on? the answer is fear of golf.

David Taylor

#39. If I haven't any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.

Anne Frank

#40. I'm pretty grounded on my own passion - writing books, you know, doing programs, speaking around the country. And I love what I do.

Stedman Graham

#41. People like Pete Peterson, the former secretary of commerce and Blackstone and titan of Wall Street, etc., has been writing books for years about the debt and deficit.

Mario Cuomo

#42. The fun one can have writing books about books is limitless, to be honest.

Jasper Fforde

#43. Writing books for me is anyway much like a military campaign. I confess to fighting my way through with military metaphors. There is a strategy, an overall concept, and there are tactics along the way ... Tradition would say I was a 'child of Mars.'

James Hillman

#44. Apart from writing books, my 40s have been about pursuing personal growth. Whatever were the mistakes of my earlier life, I've been committed to a pause, a regroup. I don't want to make the same mistakes in the future.

Monique Roffey

#45. If I lose, then I have to accept that my way of writing books is not the way society says it's okay to write.

Asne Seierstad

#46. Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.

Padgett Powell

#47. Parallel Realities: While people sit in a coffee shop talking about their problems, challenges and struggles, I sit among them writing books with the solutions.

Robin Sacredfire

#48. Writing books about whores ... I'll bet you newer ... joined giblets wiv a man in your lily-white life.'
Dr. Hindley and Worthy began to reprove him, but Sara smiled quizzically. ' "Joined giblets?" ... I've never heard it put that way before.

Lisa Kleypas

#49. Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'

Joanne Harris

#50. When I was just writing books and giving lectures, if people disagreed, they just didn't buy your book or attend your lectures. But, if you're leading a congregation, people feel they have the right to tell you what you should or shouldn't talk about. And that hasn't always been easy for me.

Marianne Williamson

#51. Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations - that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls.

Richard Flanagan

#52. I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.

Francis Fukuyama

#53. A life of writing books is a trying adventure in which you cannot find out where you are unless you lose your way.

Philip Roth

#54. Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.

Amy Bloom

#55. I'm just having fun making jokes and writing books. But you see me once a year, I come on when I have a new book out, but basically, I've got my nose to the grindstone and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do in life, which is make stories.

T.C. Boyle

#56. Authors go on writing books, and so we go on reading them. It is a sad state of affairs.

Elizabeth Aston

#57. I would probably have been very content as a scholar to have carried on organising exhibitions and writing books and teaching.

Thomas P. Campbell

#58. I don't think the process of writing books is in any way sensible. It's not logical, and it's not reasonable. I do write very fast, and I just do it in a binge. Other people binge-drink; I binge-write.

Kerry Greenwood

#59. I've done everything I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but I've been swindled all the same because it's never anything more.

Simone De Beauvoir

#60. I like writing books. I really love words. I love to read.

Kerry Greenwood

#61. The challenge of writing books for teenagers is walking the fine line between truth and what the publishers, parents, and the more conservative librarians want to hear.

Annette Curtis Klause

#62. Writing books is fun because after I do a show for a couple hours, I'm in a bus for 22 hours. It's not hard for me to look out the window and tell a joke here and there.

Willie Nelson

#63. I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

Mark Haddon

#64. Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that is about how amazing books are and how amazing the people who write books are. Writers love writing books like this, and for some reason, we let them get away with it.

Josh Lieb

#65. I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them. *1937

Samuel Beckett

#66. I think when you first start out, you're writing books that are about your immediate place.

Jami Attenberg

#67. I've always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor - I never would have imagined that. Writing books - I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. - I'm not sure I would even have imagined that. I've lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.

Drew Gilpin Faust

#68. The art of writing books is not yet invented. But it is at the point of being invented. Fragments of this nature are literary seeds. There may be many an infertile grain among them: nevertheless, if only some come up!

Novalis

#69. Nobody wanted me. I just kept writing books and learning my craft. Most writers aren't very good in the beginning.

Phyllis A. Whitney

#70. My name became a brand, and I'd love to say that was the plan from the start. But the only plan was to keep writing books. And I've stuck to that ever since.

John Grisham

#71. When he was alive, you shared a great affinity. A love of writing, books, Shakespeare, journalism, a certain way of looking at the world," Marla says. "You must have felt very validated by him, understood for who you were. Your incredible connection to him was very empowering.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa

#72. I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.

Monica Ali

#73. When I'm writing books, something weird happens; and the result is the books contain a large amount of what you could call 'supernaturalism.' As a writer, I find I need that to explain the world I'm writing about.

Salman Rushdie

#74. I think people get satisfaction from living for a cause that's greater than themselves. They want to leave an imprint. By writing books, I'm trying to do that in a modest way.

Daniel H. Pink

#75. I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

Richard Russo

#76. If thou need money, get it in an honest way by keeping books, if thou wilt, but not by writing books.

John Lancaster Spalding

#77. Then that had passed. It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books;

William Faulkner

#78. Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

Aime Cesaire

#79. I hope to be remembered for writing books about social justice that also have enough aesthetic value to endure as works of literature.

Jonathan Kozol

#80. There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

Terry Pratchett

#81. I wonder whether the gentlemen who make a business and a living out of writing books, ever find their own selves getting in the way of their subjects, like me?

Wilkie Collins

#82. [Writing] books is really fun because your "voice" is pretty undiluted. There is a very direct connection between yourself and your audience. You will have an editor, but their job is to help you clarify or improve your voice, not change it.

Liz Tuccillo

#83. I found, through the process of doing 'The Perks of Being a Wallflower,' that I really love directing movies and I love writing books and so this will become the centerpiece of my career for the next ten or twenty years. Doing these adaptations.

Stephen Chbosky

#84. I organize a chess festival in Hungary. I support chess in schools, and I have my own chess foundation. And I started writing books.

Garry Kasparov

#85. Writing books is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public.

Paulo Coelho

#86. Writing books can be very individual - one might strike you as helpful that someone else found useless, or that you might not have appreciated at some other time in your life.

Ann Leckie

#87. I read Wolfe's new book _ The Story of a Novel_ and as usual he stole the whole damn thing from me. I am going to write and say will you please stop writing books you bastard.

Jean Stafford

#88. Mostly I'm just writing books for the public, and so I try to describe for the public what the choices are, what they might have to expect in the future and so by warning people ahead of time maybe you have an effect.

Freeman Dyson

#89. My philosophy on writing books is that if you learn only one new thing, or even get a new take on something you already know, it's worth it.

James Scott Bell

#90. During the 1980s, when Japan's economy was roaring and people were writing books with titles like 'Japan is Number One,' most Japanese college students didn't make the effort to become fluent in English.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#91. As a kid I was told to quit daydreaming! Don't you want to be a success like Joe, who always listens?
Now, I'm an adult and Joe is in jail and I'm writing books, go figure.

P.M. Russell

#92. What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.

Lauren Myracle

#93. The first book is the book you have to write to get back at your parents; the book you always had in you. Once you get that out of your way, you can start writing books,

Shirley Jackson

#94. When I did start writing books, I didn't realize it, but the girls that grew up watching the show became moms.

Lisa Whelchel

#95. Ten years from now I plan to be sitting here, looking out over my land. I hope I'll be writing books, but if not, I'll be on my pond fishing with my kids. I feel like the luckiest guy I know.

John Grisham

#96. I know nothing of writing books properly. I write in the same manner I live life: one feeling at a time. If this makes me a bad writer, then I might hope to author several bad books.

Cara Rosalie Olsen

#97. It seems like just yesterday my son was hiding under the table to avoid reading. Now, he's writing books longer than mine!

Rick Riordan

#98. I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

James Frey

#99. I'm an author. And writers write books. And writing books is a full-time career.

Marianne Williamson

#100. One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.

Mary Roach