writing

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."

"We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it."

"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."

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

"People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad."

"I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]"

"We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to."

"If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’."

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

"Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace."

"DWIGHT:Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people."

"I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead."

"When the last dime is gone, I'll sit on the curb outside with a pencil and a ten cent notebook and start the whole thing over again."

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

"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."

"When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story."

"The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it."

"What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?"

"I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live."