writing

"I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r"

"If you want to change the world, pick up your pen and write."

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

"When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day."

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."

"Grand. There's a word I really hate. It's a phony. I could puke every time I hear it."

"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."

"The first draft is just you telling yourself the story."

"When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape."

"Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?"

"Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come."

"Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done."

"When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story."

"Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything- or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance."

"Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be."

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."

"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."

"Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes."

"Maybe I hope too much. Maybe I dream too much or maybe I love too much to just give up on you."