#writing

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."

"Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context."

"Maybe love was meant to save us from ourselves."

"Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd."

"You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road."

"I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker."

"No one says a novel has to be one thing. It can be anything it wants to be, a vaudeville show, the six o’clock news, the mumblings of wild men saddled by demons."

"When asked, "How do you write?"I invariably answer, "One word at a time,"and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope."

"...there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing."

"Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder."

"Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream."

"If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist."

"You do what you were made to do. Some of us were made to read and write. Thanks be to God."

"Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on."

"I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing."

"Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery."

"The Sacred and The Scared. Which of these two categories does your love fall under? I should write a love poem on a rolled-up scroll so you’d know which one categorizes mine."

"It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for."

"Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish."

"It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine."