writing

"And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!"

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos."

"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."

"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy"

"It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo."

"I have always had more dread of a pen, a bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper than of a sword or pistol."

"Writer speaks a stench."

"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say."

"Writing is a delicious agony."

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

"Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins."

"Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives"

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

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

"Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses."Carrie Fisher: "I did masses of opiates religiously."

"Procrastination is opportunity's natural assassin."

"We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

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

"You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves."

"[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start."(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)"