writing

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf"came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf"and there was no wolf behind him."

"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."

"You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come."

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say."

"The joy of writing.The power of preserving.Revenge of a mortal hand."

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."

"He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it."

"A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law."

"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name."

"Like madness is the glory of this life."

"I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read."This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons."

"What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else."

"You can fix anything but a blank page."

"No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it"

"Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible."

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."

"She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable."

"The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."