writing

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

"Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love."

"I like to write when I feel spiteful. It is like having a good sneeze."(Letter to Cynthia Asquith, November 1913)"

"...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining."

"Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out."

"Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."

"...(W)here there's drama, there's crap."

"I write to find out what I'm talking about."

"Don't you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?"

"I curse in cursive. It's hard to read and harder take. But if you take it black, like coffee, then at least it may wake you up to the realities of life."

"A writer used to live life like Julius Seizure: I came, I saw, I queried. Now you can take control of your consciousness and self-publish."

"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right"we whisper, "I'm here, I love you."and we lie: "I'll never leave you."For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad."

"Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it."

"But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."

"Then you should say what you mean,"the March Hare went on. "I do,"Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.""Not the same thing a bit!"said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat"is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!"

"I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they "don't have time to read."This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest saying that he didn't have time to buy any rope or pitons."

"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. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway."

"Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done."

"You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?"

"(An unhappy childhood was not) an unsuitable preparation for my future, in that it demanded a constant wariness, the habit of observation, and the attendance on moods and tempers; the noting of discrepancies between speech and action; a certain reserve of demeanour; and automatic suspicion of sudden favours."