#writing

"You can make anything by writing."

"An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional."

"Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?"

"My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college."

"First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice."

"I write out of revenge."

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

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

"I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel."

"I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit."

"Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story."

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."

"Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing."

"[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.)"

"Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called."

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

"But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world."

"Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out."

"It was never about the world being too big, it was more like she was too much for the world to handle."

"She needed the chaos within her in order to discover the extraordinary no man could ever reach."