#writing

"Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon."

"I arrived, I saw humans and I saw through their faces. Nothing ever changes but the light in their eyes. For I too have buried my demons today, without knowing what might remain beneath the face of tomorrow."

"You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?"

"The pages afforded glimpses into my soul where I'd hidden it, behind masks of paper and ink."

"I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel glosbal doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt."

"All novels are sequels; influence is bliss."

"Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things."

"I know the X’s and O’s of football. I just don’t know the other 24 letters. And as a writer, this bothers me."

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it."

"The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind."

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

"Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him."Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded."

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."

"A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him."

"At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write."

"She looked away. Her attitude seemed to suggest that she had finished with him, and would be obliged if somebody would come and sweep him up."

"If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’."

"I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel."

"I want an infinitely blank book and the rest of time......why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time, my greatest regret is how much I believed in the future."

"The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor."