writing

"We swallowed the chaos because we knew we didn't want to be ordinary."

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

"If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it."

"Good fiction creates its own reality."

"The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."

"He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan."

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

"Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper."

"Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery."

"When I started writingI was a sick teenagedfuck inside who partlythought I was the newMarquis de Sade, a bodydoomed to communicatewith Satan who was us-ing my sickness as hishome away from home,and there’s your proof."

"It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought."

"Tweeting is talking into the abyss, filling a void in your life by avoiding real human contact."

"If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed."

"The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement."

"If a story is in you, it has to come out."

"Every writer I know has trouble writing."

"I type on my keyboard like I’m Beethoven on the piano. My words may be silent in the air, but they ring as music in my mind while I write."

"Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s."

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly."