John Steinbeck Quotes

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

I am very spontaneous when I write; it kind of just comes out. I never think about what I'm going to write about first... it just sort of comes out like word vomit.

I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.

You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

In my office I have a sign that says, 'Don't think. Just write!' and that's how I work. I try not to worry about each word, or even each sentence or paragraph. For me, stories evolve. Writing is a process. I rewrite each sentence, each manuscript, many times.

I spill it out as fast as I can. I don't really edit. In Brazil, recently, I wrote 70 pages. In London, 80 pages.

I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be.

Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, 'Casino Royale' dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.

When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.

When I start to write, I don't have any plan at all. I just wait for the story to come.

The material came bubbling up inside like a geyser or an oil gusher. It streamed up of its own accord, down my arm and out of my fountain pen in a torrent of six thousand words a day.

I should be concentrating on writing pages.

Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.

I don't work in a straight line. I don't write with an outline. I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together.

I wrote the first draft of 'Plan B' the summer after I turned 21.

I don't get a lot of writer's block, because it's all based on research. I just start looking through my notes, and I can write garbage for days - I mean, some of it ends up being good.

When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write.

I write an actual script rather quickly - a draft will take me two weeks - but I write a lot of drafts. My big thing is I don't re-read. When I write, I never re-read back. I'll send it, because if I re-read back, it will cripple me.

I sit down and I write what I'm thinking and what I feel - it happens all at once, I never stop writing.

I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.

You just write and you don't try to make sense of it. You just put it down the way you got it.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper.

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.