#writing

"Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!"

"Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch."

"A writer always writes."

"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."

"Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind."

"Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living."

"Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose."

"Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done."

"With my career I want to either make something or make an impact. Writers both make something, and make an impact."

"All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate."

"A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."

"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."

"The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies."

"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system."

"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"!"

"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."

"Cheekbones that cut like ice and eyes like liquid scotch. Loren Hale is an alcoholic beverage and he doesn't even know it."

"Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer."

"You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success - but only if you persist."

"Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce."