#writing

"Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft."

"I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]"

"I'm not a writer. Ernest Hemingway was a writer. I just have a vivid imagination and type 90 WPM."

"Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent."

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

"I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity."

"I am telling you what I know—words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them."

"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."

"All thoughts, secret or spoken, belong in a coffee table book written in Braille, so you can really feel the emotions."

"Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses."Carrie Fisher: "I did masses of opiates religiously."

"The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all."

"Early on I set out to write the next Great American Novel, and then later on I set out the silverware and enjoyed my dinner in silence."

"some moments are nice, some arenicer, some are even worthwritingabout."

"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

"CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.JOEL: I know.CLEMENTINE: What do we do?JOEL: Enjoy it."

"and sometimes I sitdown at my typewriterand I thinknot of someonecause there isn't anyoneto thinkabout and i wonderis it worth it"

"People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy."

"Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down."

"A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off"

"Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear."