#writing

"When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse."

"Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it."

"A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar."

"Excuse me, I feel interrupted and I think I've overdose from the idea of loving you."

"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."

"The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that I am sure is why he does it."

"Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?"

"He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it."

"Using my nipples as bait, I went fishing for compliments. I got a few bites, but nothing to write about in Field & Stream."

"I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I’m very well endowed."

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

"Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of."

"My advice to aspiring writers is to read more, write more, and network more. More, more, and more. Then, after you've done all that, do it some more."

"My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college."

"A book comes and says, 'Write me."

"I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die."

"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?"

"[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!"

"A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing."

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."