#writing

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."

"You don’t make art out of good intentions."

"You can make anything by writing."

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

"You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love."

"Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."

"My pen shall heal, not hurt."

"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."

"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."

"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."

"All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal."

"Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's."

"Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm."

"I think I’m mouth blind and that’s why all food tastes bland. The only things that have any flavor are the words I love you."

"When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day."

"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."

"I kept loving and loving and loving. Every waking hour, I marveled on how these moments would make made me feel. I wanted to love the world and be the change it so deliciously craved."

"A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been."

"But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."

"Like madness is the glory of this life."