#writing

"There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed."

"Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!"

"Good fiction creates its own reality."

"In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood."

"I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it."

"Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear."

"Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay."

"All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

"I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say."

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."

"You never know who you're inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think."

"If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway."

"When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it."

"And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it."

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

"writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all"

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

"The job of the first eight pages is not to have the reader want to throw the book at the wall, during the first eight pages."

"...(W)here there's drama, there's crap."

"To love is to soar in the wild unexpectedly."