writing

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."

"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."

"As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself."

"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."

"Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

"We all have our time machines, don't we. Those that take us back are memories...And those that carry us forward, are dreams."

"But I don’t want to go among mad people,"Alice remarked."Oh, you can’t help that,"said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.""How do you know I’m mad?"said Alice."You must be,"said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here."

"Writing is a delicious agony."

"You always get more respect when you don't have a happy ending."

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"

"Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal."

"When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can."

"A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you'll never forget."

"My advice to aspiring writers is to read more, write more, and network more. More, more, and more. Then, after you've done all that, do it some more."

"For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society."

"Maybe love was meant to save us from ourselves."

"Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it."

"There are very few innocent sentences in writing."