writing

"I hate writing, I love having written."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch."

"Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal."

"I had to learn to live without you and I couldn't make sense of it, because I left so much of me inside of you."

"Let's see if I can write about something other than my heart."

"You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it."

"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."

"You rely too much on brain. The brain is the most overrated organ."

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

"For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing."

"All I'm writing is just what I feel, that's all. I just keep it almost naked. And probably the words are so bland."

"I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works."

"People who write fiction, if they had not taken it up, might have become very successful liars."

"Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon."

"Instead of reciting her an original love poem using words, I think I’ll use my tongue to more creatively explore the deepest parts of her."

"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."

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

"It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written."

"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."