writing

"...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing."

"When I go off the grid, my main source of light will be fireflies. Oh, and the glow that will come from the epic love poem I am writing for you."

"you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will."

"I felt like poisoning a monk."

"Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

"Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake."

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."[The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]"

"Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory."

"A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off"

"I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."

"Spelling Bees are useless and unnecessary competitions. Before Microsoft Word and Google, Spelling Bees had value, but now they are all superflewus."

"Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still."

"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."

"...you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit."

"My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn't like math;in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything."

"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."

"writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all"

"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."

"I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh."

"Write,' she said, 'as if you'll never be read. That way you'll be sure to tell the truth."