#writing

"Don't get it right - get it WRITTEN!"

"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."

"I write to understand as much as to be understood."

"The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible."

"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."

"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."

"I know how you feel because I’ve been there too. I’ve hated and I’ve loved. I’ve seen my demons root and crawl and my angels branch and soar. I've died within myself and lived a thousand different lives. I too fight the same war and I too am drowning in the puddles of self-consciousness this world created."

"When I go off the grid, my main source of light will be fireflies. Oh, and the glow that will come from the epic love poem I am writing for you."

"Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please."

"Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money."

"Imagine in vibrant, wonderful detail your heart’s desire—a reality only you can envision, an adventure only you can direct.Then cradle your creation. Caress it. Mold it. Coddle it until it comes to life.And when your precious treasure grows so grand as to steal your breath away, set it free for all the world to experience. For that is how you live your dreams."

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are."

"Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space."

"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

"...Writings can be stolen, or changed, or used for evil purposes. But isn't the risk worth taking? The more people who share knowledge, the greater safeguard for it. Isn't there more danger in ignorance than knowledge?"

"It’s 4:00 in the afternoon and I’m just now putting on clothes. The life of a writer is as free as the pizza I just had delivered is not."

"A letter is a soul, so faithful an echo of the speaking voice that to the sensitive it is among the richest treasures of love."

"Chris Claremont once said of Alan Moore, "if he could plot, we'd all have to get together and kill him."Which utterly misses the most compelling part of Alan's writing, the way he develops and expresses ideas and character. Plot does not define story. Plot is the framework within which ideas are explored and personalities and relationships are unfolded."

"My definition of dictionary can’t be found in the dictionary. Dictionary—A linguistic prison, confining words to well-defined cells, with little chance of parole."

"Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version."