#writing

"After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day."

"I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book."

"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don’t care to know any more."

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

"Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination."

"Tell the story that's been growing in your heart, the characters you can't keep out of your head, the tale story that speaks to you, that pops into your head during your daily commute, that wakes you up in the morning."

"You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?"I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself."

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

"I had a dream about you. You were writing names and numbers in a book, and I asked if that was a phone book or the Book of Life. You answered in a way that blinded me with light, and I grew afraid. So I said, “Hey, what is that over there?” and I pointed over your shoulder, and when you turned to look I scribbled my name on the bottom of page one."

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

"Writing is the geometry of the soul."

"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."

"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."

"Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience."

"Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing."

"How to Write a PoemCatch the airaround the butterfly."

"The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do."

"Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty."

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

"It has taken me years of struggle, hard work, and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence."