writing

"Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you."

"I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else. My son died. And I was hurt, but I watched my hurt, and even relished it, a little, for now I could write a real death, a true loss. My heart was broken by my dark lady, and I wept, in my room, alone; but while I wept, somewhere inside I smiled."

"A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty."

"You’ll drown in my love story, if I ever write it using a fountain pen."

"For me, literacy means freedom. For the individual and for society."

"No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it"

"When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off."

"Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story."

"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."

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."

"Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?"

"Every day I type out my dream scribbles from the night before, looking for treasure buried deep in my subconscious."

"As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?"

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

"I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral."

"As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself."

"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."

"I am a man"he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone woman, and bring me something brown."

"A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing."

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon."