Joseph Epstein Quotes

I just start writing, and in the process, one hopefully comes up with ideas and solutions and explores all the little nooks and crannies.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

As I write, invariably I encounter more questions and answer those as I go.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

... writing had become an essential element of the process of thinking. Not until I had put my thoughts down on paper could I examine them with objectivity.

I kind of do all of this writing as a way of thinking and learning. I'm sure it's similar to being a journalist: You get to learn, and that's the greatest kind of job.

I think that writing is a process that tells you what you think. You sometimes actually don't know what your opinion is until you hear yourself trying to piece it out and have it make sense to you. The process itself is so bizarre and mysterious that you never know what it's going to tell you.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded; it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

Writing is always a way, for me, of coming to some sort of understanding that I can't reach otherwise.It forces you to think. It forces you to work the thing through. Nothing comes to us out of the blue, very easily.

Much of the activity we think of as writing is, actually, getting ready to write.

Ultimately, writing is about trusting your own mind. It is an act of discovery.

So much of writing is discovery. Sometimes I feel like a rat in a maze, trying to discover the way out. My little heart is beating, and I'm racing down a path thinking, this is the route, it will get me there, as I turn this way and then that.

The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.

Ideas are floating like fish. Desire for an idea is like a bait on a hook. If you desire an idea, it pulls and it makes a kind of a bait. Ideas will come swimming up. And you don't know them until they enter the conscious mind. And then bingo! There it is! You know it instantly. And then more come in. If you go fishing for ideas, a lot of ideas will just pop in. And one of them will make you fall in love.

You have to have a lot of ideas. First, if you want to make discoveries, it's a good thing to have good ideas. And second, you have to have a sort of sixth sense-the result of judgment and experience-which ideas are worth following up. I seem to have the first thing, a lot of ideas, and I also seem to have good judgment as to which are the bad ideas that I should just ignore, and the good ones, that I'd better follow up.

In exploring new and doubtful tracts of speculation, the mind strikes out true and original views; as a drop of water hesitates at first what direction it will take, but afterwards follows its own course.

I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.

You need to know that going in, and you also need to be able to write all the time. So when somebody looks at you across the table and says, "What do you think about a movie where Miley Cyrus switches souls with a basset hound?" You need to be able to sit there and figure out how to make that possibly shootable.

Writing is a process of discovery of what you really do know. You can't limit yourself in advance to what you know, because you don't know everything you know.

Thinking visually is my starting point, and then the writing happens.

Writing is the act of discovery.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.