Writing Simplicity Quotes

'Life of Pi' was actually a very simple novel to write.

I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.

You just write about things that happen.

But with writing, all you need is a pad of paper.

Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.

I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like child stringing beads in kindergarten, - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence. An awful lot of modern writing seems to me to be a depressed use of language. Once, I called it "vow-of-poverty prose." No, give me the king in his countinghouse. Give me Updike.

What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.

I'm a person who, when I set out to write, I write. It's just like when you set out to eat, you eat, or when you set out to sleep, you sleep. I don't do somersaults to write something. I just do it.

No, absolutely not, writing doesn't have to be like a jigsaw puzzle, it can be a very linear undertaking.

I never question the way I write. Writing is the only thing that's without seams for me. It's an effort to talk because my pictures have to be turned into these sounds. It's an effort to be alive. It's work. But writing is wonderful.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

For me, the dialogue is the easiest part of writing. It just always seems so obvious what a character will say. Maybe it's because I talk too much!

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.

How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.

I'm not one of those deeper, ethereal writers. I'm just trying to get it done.

When I thought I couldn't write recipes, my boss at the time advised, 'Write as you talk.'

I had no idea how complicated and solitary it could be to write a simple book.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

If you write for somebody that you know, then your job is so much easier.

If I can write one sentence, simple and true every day, I'll be satisfied.

I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.

Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The art of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them.