writing

"When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest."

"A novel is a mirror walking along a main road."

"I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world’s most perfect haiku."

"Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things."

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."

"It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand. ~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise"

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

"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 first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind."

"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."

"Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story."

"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God."

"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 wasn't born to cook or clean,but to read and write,if you don't like me the way I am,then go fly a kite."

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

"I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works."

"A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries."

"A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar."

"I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too."

"The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself)."