#writing

"It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it."

"I’ll be your Dostoevsky, if you’ll be my Tolstoy. Our life together will be so full of despair that death will be like a gulag full of joy."

"Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon."

"If you have a story that seems worth telling, and you think you can tell it worthily, then the thing for you to do is to tell it, regardless of whether it has to do with sex, sailors or mounted policemen."

"I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book."

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

"Wasn't writing a kind of soaring, an achievable form of flight, of fancy, of the imagination?"

"When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time."

"Writers Are Insane. For months we are lone wolves locked in our caves. Then overnight we become publicity hounds. It's a schizophrenic business."

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard."

"You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil."

"Never put off writing until you are better at it."

"Love isn’t in a hurry like a flurry of flowery words on paper. It’s lush and slow to grow its aroma in the garden of time."

"Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions."

"If Pavlov tested his cat he would have failed."

"I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy."

"If a story is not about the hearer, he will not listen. And here I make a rule—a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last."

"End with an image and don't explain."

"Knocking on a door is so violent. Instead, try talking to the door to get it to open up to you. I should write a self-help book for door-to-door salesmen."

"Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works."