writing

"You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest."

"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."

"The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste."

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

"You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?"

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

"You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty."

"Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it's the only way you can do anything good."

"Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost."

"Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college."

"It is the tale, not he who tells it."

"Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it."

"The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written."

"…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew…."

"Writing is the geometry of the soul."

"Better a good journalist than a poor assassin."

"You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?"I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself."

"Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent."

"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."

"We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it."