writing

"Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts."

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."

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

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."

"Just start the sentence...and see what happens. This is how we write."

"I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker."

"Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet."

"It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for."

"You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all."

"Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race"

"One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

"It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine."

"One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke."

"I write to understand as much as to be understood."

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?"

"I bleed ink for her, because her name is written on my heart. She’s the author of all the love I have to give."

"Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow."

"I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out of my ears, my eyes, my noseholes--everywhere. Until it's every breath I breathe. I'm going to go out like a fucking meteor!"

"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."