writing

"I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up."

"Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up."

"We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it."

"هو لا يفهم أن نفسيتي كإناء من "الكريستال"الرقيق تكفيه نقرة جافة ليتصدع إلى الأبد. لا، هو لا يفهم أن جهود حياته بأكملها لن تعيد الإناء إلى نقاءه الأصلي."

"I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity."

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

"All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland."

"I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."

"Usually I'm remarkably good natured. Try me on a day that doesn't end in y."

"Hello, I'm Shellie's new boyfriend and I'm out of my mind. If you so much as talk to her or even think her name, I'll cut you in ways that'll make you useless to a woman."

"No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside."

"She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up."

"A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled."

"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."

"Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff."

"Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but 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."

"I never met a word I didn't love"

"I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel."

"writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all"

"Isn't it mysterious to begin a new journal like this? I can run my fingers through the fresh clean pages but I cannot guess what the writing on them will be."