writing

"A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

"The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up."

"Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism."

"Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.... Virtually every page is a cliffhanger--you've got to force them to turn it."~"

"Usually I'm remarkably good natured. Try me on a day that doesn't end in y."

"The Sacred and The Scared. Which of these two categories does your love fall under? I should write a love poem on a rolled-up scroll so you’d know which one categorizes mine."

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."

"I write out of revenge."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well. This to me is a miracle."

"Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent."

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."

"This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible. And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be."

"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."

"She needed the chaos within her in order to discover the extraordinary no man could ever reach."

"I want to write a poem about "Truth,""Honor,""Dignity,"and whether the toilet paper should roll over or under when you pull on it."

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

"Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."

"Writers write while dreamers procastinate."

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."