writing

"A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him."

"The thing I write will be the thing I write."

"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."

"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money."

"Writing, painting, singing- it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives."

"I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up."

"Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy."

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."

"True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’."

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

"Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."

"Every writer I know has trouble writing."

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

"As a fiction writer, let me make it up, and let me make it up to you. I’ll pen our love story, if you’ll be my co-author."

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

"Maybe love was meant to save us from ourselves."

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it."

"Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow."