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."

"If Pavlov tested his cat he would have failed."

"Usually I'm remarkably good natured. Try me on a day that doesn't end in y."

"Death is the easy part, the hard part is living and knowing you could be so much more then you’re willing to be."

"Write about the emotions you fear the most."

"Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar."

"I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it."

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."

"A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

"I couldn't even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn't let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn't stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane."

"I don't think all writers are sad, she said.I think it's the other way around—all sad people write."

"To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment."

"I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes."

"It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world."

"Writing is a delicious agony."

"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."

"The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows."

"When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer."

"When we hold each other, in the darkness, it doesn't make the darkness go away. The bad things are still out there. The nightmares still walking. When we hold each other we feel not safe, but better. "It's all right"we whisper, "I'm here, I love you."and we lie: "I'll never leave you."For just a moment or two the darkness doesn't seem so bad."

"If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door."