#writing

"Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him."

"File under "Hard Truths": the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting."

"Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is used and nothing is lost. Because it's something to do to pass the time until she is old enough to experience the things she writes about."

"My pen shall heal, not hurt."

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme."

"I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story."

"Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone."

"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together."

"Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them.Writing is still the wildest thing I know."

"He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish."

"There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair."

"Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?"

"When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time."

"Write from the soul, not from some notion about what you think the marketplace wants.The market is fickle; the soul is eternal'."

"A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."

"The desire to write grows with writing."

"Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy."

"Passion is a deep love for sacred activity."

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

"A good piece of fiction, in my view, does not offer solutions. Good stories deal with our moral struggles, our uncertainties, our dreams, our blunders, our contradictions, our endless quest for understanding. Good stories do not resolve the mysteries of the human spirit but rather describe and expand up on those mysteries."