Carol Burnett Quotes

Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.

Write the way you talk. Naturally.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

Publishing in a way doesn't have a lot to do with writing, and writing doesn't have a lot to do with publishing.

Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I'm talking to people. It doesn't always work, and one shouldn't always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

Writing and telling are almost the same, the way I do it.

I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.

When I write I try as far as possible to forget I'm writing it at all. I tell it down onto the page, as if I'm telling it to one person only, my best friend.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

word thrower … phrase maker

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

Writing can be fun. I think the challenge is to convey interesting things in accessible ways, and that's what I aim to do in books.

Some people read. I like to put words together.

Technology must remain a tool. It's a great tool, but technology is the pen to write the book. It's not the book. If you have a great pen, maybe you'll write faster or it will look better, but at the end, you have something to say, or you don't.

Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to tell stories, but I never had the patience to sit down at a typewriter and write short stories or anything like that. I started writing songs as a way of communicating ideas the best way I could.

The way you write affects what you say.

A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

Writing in the first person automatically gives you a point of view.

As for style of writing, if one has anything to say, it drops from him simply and directly, as a stone falls to the ground.

We speak naturally but spend all our lives trying to write naturally.

[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut.