writing

"There comes a time in your life when you have to choose to turn the page, write another book or simply close it."

"Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing."

"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."

"In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it."

"You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write."

"Writers will happen in the best of families."

"Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole."

"She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up."

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."

"When I begin to doubt my ability to work the word, I simply read another writer and know I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself, to do it right, with power, and force, and delight, and gamble."

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

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

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"

"Writing is an affair of yearning for great voyages and hauling on frayed ropes."

"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"

"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."

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

"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right"we whisper, "I'm here, I love you."and we lie: "I'll never leave you."For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad."

"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions."

"You're miserable, edgy and tired. You're in the perfect mood for journalism."