writing

"He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin."

"I often fantasize about torturing some of the lazier letters of the alphabet, like C, U, and E, because together they only manage to accomplish as much as the solitary letter Q."

"Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time."

"All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea."

"If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days."

"Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted."

"If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day... You don't go to a well once but daily. You don't skip a child's breakfast or forget to wake up in the morning..."

"Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination."

"I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man."

"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy"

"I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go."

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it"

"To become successful, one must put themselves in the paths of giants!"

"It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book."

"Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels."

"You never push a noun against a verb without trying to blow up something."

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

"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."

"one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood."