writing

"I'm an aspiring writer.' I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not."

"Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."

"This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me."

"If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door."

"I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else."

"A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul."

"I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography."

"My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his ideal."

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish."

"All this time I've hated myself for it. I thought I'd given it up for nothing. But if I hadn't fallen, I wouldn't have met you."

"In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies."

"It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required."

"If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen."

"At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night."

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

"I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world’s most perfect haiku."

"The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it."

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."

"And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word."

"Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions."(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)"