writing

"The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. 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."

"I write to understand as much as to be understood."

"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."

"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women"

"The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion."

"String several words together in a sentence and you have a language necklace. My I love you would look great with your favorite red dress."

"You are what you write."

"You gotta run more than your mouth to escape the treadmill of mediocrity. A true hustler jogs during the day, and sleepwalks at night."

"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."

"Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone."

"When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?"Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?"You don't get ideas. Ideas get you."

"Every writer I know has trouble writing."

"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

"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"

"Write to your fear."

"A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been."

"A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it."

"White letters plus white paper equals invisibility. Just because you can’t see my love for you, doesn’t mean I didn’t write about it."

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