writing

"take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning"

"To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man."

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more."

"String several words together in a sentence and you have a language necklace. My I love you would look great with your favorite red dress."

"My writing has appeared in the New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, though whenever the newsstand guy catches me scribbling my poetry in them, he always comes along later and erases it."

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

"When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse."

"There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself."

"You can make anything by writing."

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."

"As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself."

"I know the X’s and O’s of football. I just don’t know the other 24 letters. And as a writer, this bothers me."

"People will tell you that writing is too difficult, that it's impossible to get your work published, that you might as well hang yourself. Meanwhile, they'll keep writing and you'll have hanged yourself."

"I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work."

"There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well."

"…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…."

"Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it."

"Love isn’t in a hurry like a flurry of flowery words on paper. It’s lush and slow to grow its aroma in the garden of time."

"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness."