writing

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

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

"Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?"

"We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes."

"Writer's block is just a symptom of feeling like you have nothing to say, combined with the rather weird idea that you should feel the need to say something. Why? If you have something to say, then say it. If not, enjoy the silence while it lasts. The noise will return soon enough."

"To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist."

"When I type a title page, I hold it and I look at it and I think, I just need four thousand sentences to go with this and I’ll have a book."

"Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

"A snowball in the face is surely the perfect beginning to a lasting friendship."

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

"I type on my keyboard like I’m Beethoven on the piano. My words may be silent in the air, but they ring as music in my mind while I write."

"Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!"

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."

"nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing."

"I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again..."

"I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them."

"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger."

"A writer always writes."