#writing

"You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves."

"Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being."

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

"At this rate, I'm still going to be aspiring by the time I'm expiring."

"You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest."

"A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God."

"I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.[Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction, New York Times, April 19, 1992]"

"Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation."

"To have the beginning of a truly great story, you need to have a character you're completely and utterly obsessed with. Without obsession, to the point of a maddening addiction,there's no point to continue."

"I go on writing so that I will always have something to read."

"You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live."

"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."

"Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s."

"Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.... Virtually every page is a cliffhanger--you've got to force them to turn it."~"

"Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch."

"You are either born a writer or you are not."

"I write because I must. It's not a choice or a pastime, it's an unyeilding calling and my passion."

"Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing."

"I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."