"Anthropologists are great at novelistic observations. I would be thrilled if this novel would encourage anthropologists to write what they see in fictional form."
Read quote
3 likes
Writing quotes
Writing
30.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Writing
Browse quotes that often appear alongside writing — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Writing quotes (page 371 of 1537)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Anthropological fieldwork is so much like writing a novel. Granted, you don't have the physical disruption and disorientation, but writing a novel is like entering a new culture. You don't know what the hell is going on. And every day you feel like you have nothing, you're going nowhere. Or you feel that first it's going somewhere, but then you get into that horrible middle part."
Read quote
3 likes
"Ever since high school I've been writing in a spiral notebook, in pencil. Everything looks too polished on a computer when you start writing, and I can't really see it. I feel like the words are much more naked in pencil, on a notebook. I feel that my brain works differently, and words come out differently, if I have a pencil in my hand, rather than if I have a keyboard. I tend to add more in the margins. I tend to elongate the sentences as I'm writing and editing, and there is just something about the feeling of writing longhand that I really love."
Read quote
3 likes
"Writing on your own is, in a way, a very lonely profession. There's no one there to help you."
Read quote
3 likes
"I can't listen to music while writing - any such distraction would have dreadful consequences."
Read quote
3 likes
"For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen."
Read quote
3 likes
"I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine."
Read quote
3 likes
"I do a lot of research for my books. I can't possibly know all the things I write about and I love learning new things. I spend hours and hours doing research in books, libraries and online. [Once] I traveled to the reservation to get the settings and the flavor of the place down right."
Read quote
3 likes
"The hardest part for me during the creation stage is actually putting words on paper that make sense and tell my story the way I see it. I sometimes feel I am slogging through quicksand when I write."
Read quote
3 likes
"There is probably no finer prose writer alive in Britain now, no-one better at making a sentence, no-one better at descriptive writing, no-one who can get so close to the vividness of other peoples interior selves."
Read quote
3 likes
"I could write a book on the things I've done drunk."
Read quote
3 likes
"I don't tell 'U.S. Weekly' which parties I'm going to. I write songs."
Read quote
3 likes
"I've got my own studio, so I sit in my studio writing and if I get a great take, that's the take."
Read quote
3 likes
"I don't write songs thinking about formats, where is it going to get played, who am I gonna please, what's the outlet for it."
Read quote
3 likes
"I wish I could say I write 9-5. It's usually more like 8-6, every day but the weekends."
Read quote
3 likes
"Don't fall into the trap of having to have everything perfect to write or wait until the mood strikes you. If you want it as a job, treat it like a job, and just as you don't go to work only when you feel like it, you have to condition yourself to sit and write even when the ideas don't flow."
Read quote
3 likes
"I never considered I might make a career out of writing as I was going to school, so when I did turn my attentions that way, I was very ill prepared, having only what I read as a guide, and no formal training whatsoever. I credit that very ignorance with a great deal of my success."
Read quote
3 likes
"Newt spun, making her robe unfurl. “He’s my familiar, bought and paid for. I can claim anything of his. Even his life.” Al cleared his throat nervously. “That’s good to know,” he said lightly. “Important safety tip. Rachel, write that down somewhere as lesson number one."
Read quote
3 likes
"I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers."
Read quote
3 likes
"I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No - I must keep my own style & go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other."
Read quote
3 likes