writing

"And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word."

"Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever."

"Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write."

"Reading is very creative - it's not just a passive thing. I write a story; it goes out into the world; somebody reads it and, by reading it, completes it."

"I want to write about people who dream and wait for the night to end, who long for the light so they can hold the ones they love."

"The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor."

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."

"As with all other aspects of the narrative art, you will improve with practice, but practice will never make you perfect. Why should it? What fun would that be?"

"The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies."

"Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come."

"Writing- the profession in which you stare at a computer screen, stare out the window, type a few words, then curse repeatedly."

"If a story is in you, it has to come out."

"You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted."

"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."

"Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down."

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

"And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is."

"Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism."

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

"The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness."