writing

"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."

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

"She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity."

"We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter"

"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book."

"Better a good journalist than a poor assassin."

"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

"If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you."

"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read."

"Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet."

"She wildly burned for the one she loved and he stood there watching, hoping he too would catch a blaze from the violence stirring in her heart."

"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."

"At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write."

"A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing."

"A tamed woman will never leave her mark in the world."

"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write."

"He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written."

"You are what you write."

"If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks."