writing

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version."

"What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written."

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos."

"Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done."

"Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

"I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."

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

"Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire."

"Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!"

"Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke."

"Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream."

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

"Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day."

"No, women like you don't write. They carve onion sculptures and potato statues. They sit in dark corners and braid their hair in new shapes and twists in order to control the stiffness, the unruliness, the rebelliousness."

"Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time."

"I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

"A book is a suicide postponed."

"Cheekbones that cut like ice and eyes like liquid scotch. Loren Hale is an alcoholic beverage and he doesn't even know it."

"If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last."