#writing

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

"Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love."

"Writing is a job, a talent, but it's also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon."

"I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?"

"Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost."

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

"You don’t deserve my image in your head. You don’t deserve my memories in your chest."

"Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money."

"CLEMENTINE: This is it, Joel. It's going to be gone soon.JOEL: I know.CLEMENTINE: What do we do?JOEL: Enjoy it."

"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."

"If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die."

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

"Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it."

"All thoughts, secret or spoken, belong in a coffee table book written in Braille, so you can really feel the emotions."

"Writing is a delicious agony."

"I often fantasize about torturing some of the lazier letters of the alphabet, like C, U, and E, because together they only manage to accomplish as much as the solitary letter Q."

"Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form."

"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one."

"Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity."