#writing

"And ever, as the story drainedThe wells of fancy dry,And faintly strove that weary oneTo put the subject by,"The rest next time--""It is next time!"The Happy voice cry.Thus grew the tale of Wonderland"

"You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you."

"The Book of Life, I’m still writing it—both literally and literarily. So far I’ve written the Table of Contents. Right now it’s more of a coffee table."

"It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written."

"Somebody gets into trouble, then gets out of it again. People love that story. They never get tired of it."

"I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man."

"Writer's block is real. It happens. Some days you sit down at theold typewriter, put your fingers on the keys, and nothing popsinto your head. Blanko. Nada. El nothingissimo. What you dowhen this happens is what separates you from the one-of-thesedays-I'm-gonna-write-a-book crowd."

"It takes writing a billion bad words before you get to the good ones."

"On the whole, stories don't write themselves."

"Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do."

"I would rather write 10,000 notes than a single letter of the alphabet."

"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."

"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."

"If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

"Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace."

"Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening."

"I bleed ink for her, because her name is written on my heart. She’s the author of all the love I have to give."

"If you write in the Old World, and against it, your work must die, go missing, be veiled, before it can live the life for which it was destined in the New World."

"They say living well is the best revenge but sometimes writing well is even better."

"I write out of revenge."