#writing

"Martial (the main character of LOCUS SOLUS) has a very interesting conception of literary beauty: the work must contain nothing real, no observations about the world or the mind, nothing but completely imaginary constructions. These are in themselves ideas from an extrahuman world."

"A story isn't a charcoal sketch, where every stroke lies on the surface to be seen. It's an oil painting, filled with layers that the author must uncover so carefully to show its beauty."

"I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head."

"Imagination is what you do with your inspiration."

"Only by examining our personal biases can we truly grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we truly grow as people."

"To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist."

"When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer."

"Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know."

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live."

"The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat."

"How could I live above the water or breathe under it. How could I swim in darkness consumed in an ocean of you? Falling or flying towards you, losing or finding myself in you and beauty was never the word to catch all that you are. For now I know the means of the infinite and it all starts and ends with you."

"The greatest adventure is to have no fear for the blaze that lies ahead."

"It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought."

"In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling."

"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."

"Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper."

"A follow-up letter is best when not written on the back of a suicide note. Remember this next time you’re at a networking event, unless your new connection is a mortician."

"if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading."

"The decision to kiss for the first time is the most crucial in any love story. It changes the relationship of two people much more strongly than even the final surrender; because this kiss already has within it that surrender."

"Writers are the exorcists of their own demons."