writing

"My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college."

"You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it."

"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."

"Writing is not a matter of time, but a matter or of space. If you don't keep space in your head for writing, you won't write even if you have the time."

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

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."

"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."

"All the ideas in the universe can be described by words. Therefore, if you simply take all the words and rearrange them randomly enough times, you’re bound to hit upon at least a few great ideas eventually. Sausage donkey swallows flying guillotine, my love assembly line."

"Virtually every writer I know would rather be a musician."

"I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story."

"Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!"

"With all honesty, somewhere between the hello and the dreams I saw you in I fell in love."

"… and the most beautiful words ever spoken, I have not yet said to you."

"Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun."

"I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyeilding calling and my passion."

"Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon."

"Inside of all of us there is the need and the desire to be heard, to have our innermost thoughts, feelings and desires expressed for others to hear, to see and to understand. We all want to matter to someone, to leave a mark. Writers just take those thoughts, feelings and desires and express them in such a way that the reader not only reads them but feels them as well."

"Tell me this--if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life--if you knew you'd never have a line published--would you still go on writing--would you?''Of course I would,' said Emily disdainfully. 'Why, I have to write--I can't help it at times--I've just got to."

"Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream."

"Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal."