#writing

"You can't blame a writer for what the characters say."

"If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done."

"I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy."

"At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I'd end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat empty."

"The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off from here."

"Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?"

"Why write stories? To join the conversation."

"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say."

"The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience."

"Every man with a bellyful of the classics is an enemy to the human race"

"I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."

"The darkness has ink eyes, and if you stare long enough, you’re going to see it blink black. That’s the moment to start writing."

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?"

"Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,As seas of ink I spatter. Ye gods, forgive my "literary"sins --The other kind don't matter."

"A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries."

"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."

"This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me."

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."