#on-writing

"You can fix anything but a blank page."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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!"

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

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

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

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

"In the future, when something comes up, you tell exactly how it happened but write down for yourself the way you think it should have happened. Tell the truth and write the story. Then you won't get mixed up. It was the best advice Francie every got."

"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."

"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?"

"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

"A good book isn't written, it's rewritten."