writing

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

"I choose to write because it's perfect for me. It's an escape, a place I can go to hide. It's a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It's a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It's a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It's control, when I feel so out of control. It's healing, when everything seems pretty messed up.And it's fun, when life is just flat-out boring."

"What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?"

"Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm."

"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."

"People always ask me if I’m into sports, and I say, “Well, isn’t writing a sport? If you’re doing it right, and you have a deadline, you should be sweating."

"All words are pegs to hang ideas on."

"Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!"

"My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college."

"A writer used to live life like Julius Seizure: I came, I saw, I queried. Now you can take control of your consciousness and self-publish."

"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."

"When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing."

"This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man."

"Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation."

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."

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

"The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying."

"Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."

"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"

"Writer speaks a stench."