writing

"I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I’m very well endowed."

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."

"A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

"Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination."

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"

"I write because I cannot NOT write."

"It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written."

"To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself."

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."

"I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites."

"If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist."

"Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up."

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

"The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him...A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it."

"At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write."

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."

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

"Too many irons, not enough fire."

"Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation."

"A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it."