writing

"The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it."

"Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days."

"A novel is a mirror walking along a main road."

"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."

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."

"A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!"

"Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing."

"A tamed woman will never leave her mark in the world."

"Personally, I think so-called "common language"is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow"just isn't."

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

"Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal."

"And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is."

"First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft."

"In high school I used to write my love notes backwards, so she'd have to flip the paper upside-down to read it. Either that or read it in a mirror, so she can see herself as I see her, and see why I admire her."

"A writer's goal is to weave the ordinary into fine silk and the truly extraordinary into diaphanous clarity ..."

"If it's fiction, then it better be true."

"Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done."

"You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect."

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."