#writing

"Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent."

"Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper."

"DWIGHT:Stay smart. Stay cool. It's time to prove to you're friends that you're worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying. Sometimes it means killing a whole lot of people."

"Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice."

"Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters' theses."

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

"I don't write about what I know: I write in order to find out what I know."

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."

"My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see."

"With writing, we have second chances."

"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges."

"Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing."

"In high school I used to write my love notes backwards, so she'd have to flip the paper upside-down to read it. Either that or read it in a mirror, so she can see herself as I see her, and see why I admire her."

"How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?"

"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."

"If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it."

"Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write."

"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."

"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more."

"You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me."