#writing

"There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."

"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."

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

"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."

"No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it"

"I think that perhaps if I had had to slow down the ideas so that I could capture them on paper I might have stifled some of them."

"From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But lacking this, in Future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out.We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."

"If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it."

"I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else."

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

"First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand."

"Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

"The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon."

"Suddenly I remembered that laugh, it told a different story, our story."

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

"The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text."

"Like madness is the glory of this life."

"You have the itch for writing born in you. It's quite incurable. What are you going to do with it?"

"Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s."

"Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world."