#writing

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

"[A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start."(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)"

"Then you should say what you mean,"the March Hare went on. "I do,"Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.""Not the same thing a bit!"said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat"is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!"

"How do you even know I'm someone you'll want to remember? We've only seen each other once before.'(Amber)'Have you ever looked at a painting and known you had something in common with it? Have you ever seen something so beautiful you feel like crying? When I see you, I feel that way. I feel like the deepest part of me understands something vital about you.'(Virgil Daly)"

"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."

"First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice."

"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."

"You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer."

"To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday"(without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its"(no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's"(with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill"response in the average stickler."

"I had to learn to live without you and I couldn't make sense of it, because I left so much of me inside of you."

"I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."

"If you write in the Old World, and against it, your work must die, go missing, be veiled, before it can live the life for which it was destined in the New World."

"Cynics are simply thwarted romantics."

"You can make anything by writing."

"Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience."

"Write to your heart’s content and by all means, have fun with your creation. It’s your moment to do absolutely anything within those pages."

"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]"

"Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got."

"Doubt is a question mark; faith is an exclamation point. The most compelling, believable, realistic stories have included them both."

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