#writing

"Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you."

"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."

"The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."

"It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought."

"Have you thought of an ending?""Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.""Oh, that won't do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after?""It will do well, if it ever came to that.""Ah! And where will they live? That's what I often wonder."

"If I could sum it up in 50 words, I wouldn't have needed to write a whole novel about it."

"I want to see thirstIn the syllables,Tough fireIn the sound;Feel through the darkFor the scream."

"Nothing makes a person desire improvement like failure"

"I've got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen."

"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."

"I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to places I can't go."

"Writing is prayer."

"In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!"(Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886)"

"I realized that the good stories were affecting the organs of my body in various ways, and the really good ones were stimulating more than one organ. An effective story grabs your gut, tightens your throat, makes your heart race and your lungs pump, brings tears to your eyes or an explosion of laughter to your lips."

"Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced."

"Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup."

"Sleep frees our imaginations from the confines of its imprisonment. Last night I dreamt of penguins"

"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."

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

"The pages afforded glimpses into my soul where I'd hidden it, behind masks of paper and ink."