writing

"Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol."

"I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it."

"A good book will pull you in from the beginning and take you on a journey you'll never forget."

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

"He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin."

"The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering."

"Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts."

"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen."

"There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that."

"Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story."

"Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college."

"…when writing, always hook the reader with your first sentence…in love, never settle…value yourself first and this will help you to value others…life is short, so enjoy it to the fullest…everyone in the world is different, and that’s ok…"

"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."

"In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood."

"In writing, you must kill all your darlings."

"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."

"A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing."

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"

"Language is a finding-place not a hiding place."

"Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library."