writing

"If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all."

"Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?"

"Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost."

"The thing all writers do best is find ways to avoid writing."

"Cynics are simply thwarted romantics."

"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."

"If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity."

"The story is always better than your ability to write it."

"Realism can break a writer's heart."

"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."

"In general there should be gay characters in YA because a) surprise, there are gay folks everywhere and b) in my opinion as a father, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my child encountering gay folks in her literature, because see point a)."

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

"Fiction is art and art is the triumph over chaos… to celebrate a world that lies spread out around us like a bewildering and stupendous dream."

"If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind."

"Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts."

"Always mystify, torture, mislead, and surprise the audience as much as possible."

"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."

"To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday"(without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its"(no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's"(with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill"response in the average stickler."

"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 felt like poisoning a monk."