Sally Mann Quotes

Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it.

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

To some extent, all authors are a little schizophrenic. We lead most of our lives in solitary confinement, living and breathing the books that we're writing.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.

I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.

I hate everything about writing except doing it.

I'm constantly creating and writing.

I'm definitely feeling whatever's going on pretty hard. It's like playing Barbies. You're holding the Barbies, but all of the action is happening inside of your head. You might be holding them or even speaking out loud, but really, all of the animation is internal. That's sort of how I feel about my writing. And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, "Hmm, there's half a page that's good here." Then you throw out everything else.

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

Writing will remain a passion project.

I think that, for physicians who want to become writers, they have the material, the smarts, they have the logic, they know the stories; it's just a matter of being able to connect with their emotional sides - that's the key to writing good fiction.

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.

I used to think it was hard to write, and I still find the process more or less unpleasant, but if I know what I'm doing it rattles along, then the rewrite whips it into shape rather quickly.

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

People say it's cathartic to write a book, but it turned out to be quite painful!

I prefer writing originals.

I've always loved writing.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I think one of the keys to better writing is releasing all of your ideas and to not be afraid. Dream big. This could be the greatest novel in the world you know.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

I'm really such a bumbler! Writing fiction is like arranging furniture in a dark room. I can't see what I'm doing. I grope for the right words. I bump against the wrong words and stumble and stub my toe and curse and keep trying to guess what belongs in the space.

I think anytime you start relying on a format to get you by you've got weak material to begin with.