writing

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

"Don't order any of the faerie food,"said Jace, looking at her over the top of his menu. "It tends to make humans a little crazy. One minute you're munching a faerie plum, the next minute you're running naked down Madison Avenue with antlers on your head. Not,"he added hastily, "that this has ever happened to me."

"Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces."

"Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public."

"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose."

"If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea."

"There are very few innocent sentences in writing."

"Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing."

"No, it’s not a very good story - its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside."

"She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity."

"Tell me this--if you knew you would be poor as a church mouse all your life--if you knew you'd never have a line published--would you still go on writing--would you?''Of course I would,' said Emily disdainfully. 'Why, I have to write--I can't help it at times--I've just got to."

"Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself."

"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."

"When you're a writer, the question people always ask you is, "Where do you get your ideas?"Writers hate this question. It's like asking Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, "Where do you get your leeches?"You don't get ideas. Ideas get you."

"The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all."

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."

"A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."

"Using my nipples as bait, I went fishing for compliments. I got a few bites, but nothing to write about in Field & Stream."

"You may not be able to change the world, but at least you can embarrass the guilty."