writing

"People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself."

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

"No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."

"The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning and inhibit clarity."

"A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ..."

"You know, everybody's ignorant, just on different subjects."

"The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated."

"Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

"If you really want to be a writer, nobody can stop you -- and if you don't, nobody can help you."

"The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows."

"Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it."

"A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping."

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version."

"Inside of all of us there is the need and the desire to be heard, to have our innermost thoughts, feelings and desires expressed for others to hear, to see and to understand. We all want to matter to someone, to leave a mark. Writers just take those thoughts, feelings and desires and express them in such a way that the reader not only reads them but feels them as well."

"A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing."

"Writing, painting, singing- it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives."

"Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it."

"You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way."

"Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason."

"Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage."