#writing

"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."

"My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form."

"Writing is a delicious agony."

"Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before."

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot."

"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."

"Rich will be my life if I can keep my memories full and brimming, and record them on clear-eyed mornings while I set joyously to work setting pen to holy craft."

"From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short."

"Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."

"Poems are never finished - just abandoned"

"Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come."

"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

"Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all."

"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia."

"Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton."

"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write about it."

"Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives"

"When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing."

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say."

"You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil."