Writing Depth Quotes

There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'

Our scribblings are usually not lyrics but whirrings, without colour or resonance, like the tone of an engine-wheel. I believe that the cause lies in the fact that when people write, they forget for the most part to dig deeply into themselves and to feel the whole import and truth of what they are writing.

I miss my former teachers, John Hersey and James Alan McPherson. I would love to see either or both and ask what I could do to improve, to deepen my writing.

Sometimes dreams show me that my writing should go deeper. Dreams have not so much changed my work as deepened it.

A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.

Writers do well to carefully attend to those moments of inspiration, because chances are that they're writing from a very deep place. The subsequent search that ensues to continually attend to that voice that you hear is what is going to give the story drive.

I don't feel pride when I look at a magazine spread I did for Vogue, but writing is really satisfying to me. I can go so deep into people's interior lives, slowly and with complexity, over years and years sometimes. That's very rewarding, in a way that modelling never was.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

Part of the fun of writing is having messages. Without them, it's all gunfights and car chases, and none of it means anything.