#on-writing

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

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

"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?"

"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."

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

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

"Write to your fear."

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

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?"

"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."

"I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read."

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

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."

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

"A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise."

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

"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!"

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

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

"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."