writing

"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."

"You always get more respect when you don't have a happy ending."

"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one."

"The scariest moment is always just before you start."

"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."

"The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor."

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

"Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you."

"If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman."

"If no one in the entire world cared about you, did you really exist at all?"

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

"Writer’s block is only a failure of the ego."

"Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."

"A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"They say living well is the best revenge but sometimes writing well is even better."

"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."

"The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written."

"I bleed ink for her, because her name is written on my heart. She’s the author of all the love I have to give."

"The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off from here."

"Sometimes a book isn't a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.Sometimes it's the only story you knew how to tell."