writing

"In Hollywood, no one knows anything."

"CALVIN:Our hero regains consciousness at the feet of a sarcastic alien."

"One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper."

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

"In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling."

"Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol."

"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal."

"No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place."

"The story is always better than your ability to write it."

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

"If a story is in you, it has to come out."

"Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!"

"But the truth is, it's not the idea, it's never the idea, it's always what you do with it."(Online journal entry for January 31, 2009)"

"Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever."

"Here's a haiku/palindrome I wrote called, "Obsession."Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob,Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob,Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob"

"Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn't make it a living breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side."

"one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood."

"Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing."

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."

"Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning."