writing

"Writing is prayer."

"To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man."

"Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story."

"Writing's funny, it's like walking down a hall in the dark looking for the light switch, and suddenly you find it, flip it on, and then you discover the hallway you passed through is papered with the novel you've written."

"Its dark and I’m reading my scars because our moments remind me of where I should be."

"If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway."

"I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go."

"If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it."

"My advice is to write in the nude. Unless you do your writing in a public restroom, and in that case, I’d recommend wearing flip flops."

"I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!"

"We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause."

"If a story is in you, it has to come out."

"When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?"Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?"You don't get ideas. Ideas get you."

"It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world."

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

"There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it."

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them."

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

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

"Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart."