#writing

"All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful."

"After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day."

"If I’m going to write a book every American will want to read, it’s got to have lots of pictures. Those pictures must also move, and all the words in the book must be spoken and available audibly for all the readers to hear as they watch."

"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"Shut up and write."

"Loneliness sometimes gives me a quantity of creativeness - you're drinking another glass of wine and you're feeling even worse. Art doesn't work without pain; art also exists for compensating pain."

"A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge."

"No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book."

"One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke."

"When I started writingI was a sick teenagedfuck inside who partlythought I was the newMarquis de Sade, a bodydoomed to communicatewith Satan who was us-ing my sickness as hishome away from home,and there’s your proof."

"Imagination is Everything!"

"Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza."

"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?"

"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."

"The best fame is a writer's fame. It's enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat."

"To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday"(without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its"(no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's"(with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill"response in the average stickler."

"There are very few innocent sentences in writing."

"Suddenly I remembered that laugh, it told a different story, our story."

"If I'm going to sing like someone else, then I don't need to sing at all."

"If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad."