#writing

"Definition of rock journalism: People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read."

"It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world."

"First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft."

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

"If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy."

"Read to escape reality . . . Write to embrace it."

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos."

"People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad."

"Personally, I think so-called "common language"is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow"just isn't."

"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"

"The Sacred and The Scared. Which of these two categories does your love fall under? I should write a love poem on a rolled-up scroll so you’d know which one categorizes mine."

"Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it."

"The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome"doubt."

"Here's a haiku/palindrome I wrote called, "Obsession."Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob,Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob,Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob"

"I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them."

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"

"Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters."

"I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral."

"The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement."

"A book is a suicide postponed."