writing

"Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light."

"Writing blooms flowers for mind, which last forever."

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme."

"What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out."

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."

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

"let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences"

"Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me."

"We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to."

"A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

"Play around. Dive into absurdity and write. Take chances. You will succeed if you are fearless of failure."

"There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil."

"You can't blame a writer for what the characters say."

"A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty."

"It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"I am a man"he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone woman, and bring me something brown."

"Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called."

"I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them."

"Why write stories? To join the conversation."