writing

"I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again..."

"In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it."

"I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet."

"Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done."

"it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply."

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

"What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out."

"My goal is to write every day. I say it is my ideal. I am careful not to pass judgment or create anxiety if I do not do it. No one lives up to his ideal."

"Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds."

"A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger."

"Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story."

"She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen."

"You either have to write or you shouldn't be writing. That's all."

"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you."

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

"not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of . . . but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take."

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

"I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world’s most perfect haiku."

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."

"Spelling Bees are useless and unnecessary competitions. Before Microsoft Word and Google, Spelling Bees had value, but now they are all superflewus."