writing

"and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn't anyoneto thinkabout and i wonderis it worth it"

"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."

"There are perhaps many causes worth dying for, but to me, certainly, there are none worth killing for."

"For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can."

"There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts."

"That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones."

"Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream."

"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, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space."

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing."

"You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence."

"Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love."

"I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive."

"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory."

"Ink, a Drug."

"My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time."

"Good fiction creates its own reality."

"The author must keep his mouth shut when his work starts to speak."

"Why can't I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply."

"God pity the poor novelist."