#writing

"The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste."

"There Are Two Typos Of People In This World: Those Who Can Edit And Those Who Can’t"

"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."

"When I go off the grid, my main source of light will be fireflies. Oh, and the glow that will come from the epic love poem I am writing for you."

"I’m more of a journalist than anyone in the mainstream media, and I write fiction. More than fiction, I write absurd nonsense surrealism, and my work has more truth."

"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form."

"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."

"As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness. He set down his loneliness and his perplexities, and he put on paper many things he did not know about himself."

"You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back."

"I want to gather up all the ink cartridges in the universe, because somewhere, mixed in with all that ink, is the next great American novel. And I’d love nothing more than to drink it."

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."

"great writers are indecent peoplethey live unfairlysaving the best part for paper.good human beings save the worldso that bastards like me can keep creating art,become immortal.if you read this after I am deadit means I made it."

"A few weeks after the worst day, I started writing lots of letters. I don't know why, but it was one of the only things that made my boots lighter."

"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read."

"Like madness is the glory of this life."

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

"What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come."

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

"It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better."