#on-writing

"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."

"Write to your fear."

"Never put off writing until you are better at it."

"Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!"

"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them."

"The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first."

"All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful."

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

"Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?"

"Write what should not be forgotten."

"O for a Muse of fire, that would ascendThe brightest heaven of invention!"

"Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream."

"I am simply of the opinion that you cannot be taught to write. You have to spend a lifetime in love with words."

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."

"You can fix anything but a blank page."

"Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it."

"Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon."

"Only a mediocre person is always at his best."

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."

"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."