#writers

"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."

"Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of."

"I find Bukowski to be so edgy, gritty, and daring that he oozes romance, and if couples read him in bed they would appreciate what they have."

"Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?"

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

"Writing well means never having to say, "I guess you had to be there."

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."

"Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt."

"Every word I write is like a drop of my blood. If it's flowed passionately and long, I need time to recover from the emotion spent before I begin a new story. My characters are aspects of my life. I have to respectfully and carefully move between them."

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself."

"All writers should be put in a box and thrown in the sea."

"Be the energy you want others to absorb."

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."

"Every day is not a day to master but an adventure to experience."

"Greatness is achieved through kindness, compassion, and love."

"Believe so brightly that everyone sees the beauty in believing."

"Transform into your dream."

". . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them."

"You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."[Becoming a Writer/ The List, O Magazine, November 2009]"

"The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much."