#writing

"it is all very well for you to write simply and the simpler the better. But do not start to think so damned simply. Know how complicated it is and then state it simply."

"No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read."(The Course of Human Events, NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities 2003)"

"Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism."

"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."

"If you like fantasy and you want to be the next Tolkien, don’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies — Tolkien didn’t read big Tolkienesque fantasies, he read books on Finnish philology. Go and read outside of your comfort zone, go and learn stuff."

"Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love."

"My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's."

"People do not deserve good writing, they are so pleased with bad."

"You have to find your own shtick. A Picasso always looks like Picasso painted it. Hemingway always sounds like Hemingway. A Beethoven symphony always sounds like a Beethoven symphony. Part of being a master is learning how to sing in nobody else's voice but your own."

"You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it."

"Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need."

"I used to be a bumper sticker kind of writer. Now I’m more developed, and my writing often takes up whole bumpers."

"To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man."

"And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and I knew writing- even writing badly- had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing."

"A writer always writes."

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

"He looked rather pleasantly, like a blonde satan."

"Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of catching her, bashing her on the head, and squeezing every last drop out of that bitch."

"Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way."

"A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."