#writing

"The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden. And even I grow tired."

"I write to find out what I'm talking about."

"Failure is usually boring. It is the credible but unrealized threat of failure that is interesting."

"A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen."

"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."

"I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden."

"[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!"

"My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's."

"Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them."

"You are what you write."

"In Hollywood, no one knows anything."

"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad"but "good vs. good."

"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible"

"You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?"

"I learned to write nice as hell. Birds an' stuff like that, too; not just word writin'. My ol' man'll be sore when he sees me whip out a bird in one stroke. Pa's gonna be mad when he sees me do that. He don't like no fancy stuff like that. He don't even like word writin'. Kinda scare 'im, I guess. Ever' time Pa seen writin', somebody took somepin away from 'im."

"I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes."

"I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker."

"Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!"

"...there were certain chapters when I stopped writing, saw the domestic situation I was in and thought, "I don't want to face this world, let's get back to the hellish one I'm imagining."

"People tell me I look like my father. I've never seen my dad, so does that mean I look invisible?"