writing

"When we are in love, we are convinced nobody else will do. But as time goes, others do do, and often do do, much much better."

"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."

"She said she never wanted to have secrets from me nor from herself, which is why she wanted to write down everything that otherwise would be hard to talk about. As I said, later I understood that someone who flees into honesty like that fears something, fears that her life will fill with something that can no longer be shared, a genuine secret, indescribable, unutterable."

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

"[A young adult novel] ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived."

"The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome"doubt."

"Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing."

"Cynics are simply thwarted romantics."

"A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back."

"Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it."

"I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name."

"An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate."

"I can read lips. Especially if they have words tattooed on them."

"Because even among contrarians, I’m a contrarian. But all of this is just words of bronze, third place rhetoric. What do I really mean when I say we want to shock society into awareness? Do we mean we want more originality and individuality? Less TV, more reading, writing, actual thinking? Less sheep, more shepherd pie? Yes, yes, and a little more pie, please. Oh, and some more sweet tea, too"

"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."

"To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist."

"Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river."

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

"Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything."