writing

"There are very few innocent sentences in writing."

"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."

"Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza."

"Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore."

"When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again."

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

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

"Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing."

"Every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing."

"He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin."

"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions."

"First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."

"Cynics are simply thwarted romantics."

"Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace."

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

"…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew…."

"No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough."

"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."

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."

"I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name."