Writing Speed Quotes

I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.

I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.

By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.

I can write a song in about an hour if it's a simple country song.

I have written 30,000 words in a month - think of it - 30,000! I hope I am putting the right number of naughts: an average of a thousand words a day! For thirty days!

I did a song in eight minutes. I thought everybody could write songs that fast. But working with a lot of them, they don't.

It's different every time you write. Sometimes it might be harder than it was the day before. I don't like forcing it, but sometimes, if you force it a little bit, it helps you to push forward, and you get inspired in a way. I've written songs in an hour. And there are songs that have taken me six months.

I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

On 'PG-13,' the way I wrote that is that I would get my tracks ahead of time and then I would write for them, and I wrote fairly quickly.

The more I want a book to be done, the faster I type because I just want to get it out.

First, consider the pen you write with. It should be a fast-writing pen because your thoughts are always much faster than your hand. You don't want to slow up your hand even more with a slow pen. A ballpoint, a pencil, a felt tip, for sure, are slow. Go to a stationery store and see what feels good to you. Try out different kinds. Don't get too fancy and expensive. I mostly use a cheap Sheaffer fountain pen, about $1.95.... You want to be able to feel the connection and texture of the pen on paper.

Most writers can write books faster than publishers can write checks.

If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

I'm not the fastest writer. I can't just crank out ideas that are good enough.

I was swimming in my swimming pool when 'The Secret Lovers' popped entire into my head. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and finished the book in about 50 days.

I actually wrote the lyrics for 'Goodbye' in 10 minutes.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

I write pretty fast, probably faster than most people. But I might think about something for six hours, then write it in 20 minutes. So did I write for six hours and 20 minutes, or just 20 minutes? I used to write absolutely every day, except for days when I had to travel or something.

I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.

I write incredibly slowly. And, on top of that, I spent my entire youth and twenties working like a dog, so one of the things that happened when I finished 'Drown' was that I got busy living. I'd never travelled, I'd never seen anything. So I did as much travelling as my job teaching would allow.

Everybody has a cartoon of themselves. Mine is: I write very fast, and I'm ruthlessly efficient with my time.

The fastest I've ever done a book is a 112,000-word book in about a month.

A.J. Liebling, one of my heroes, used to say that he could write better than anyone who wrote faster, and faster than anyone who could write better. I'm one nine-hundredth as good as Liebling, but that principle may slightly apply.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.