#writing

"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."

"The imagination needs moodling,--long, inefficient happy idling, dawdling and puttering."

"The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible."

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

"Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!"

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly."

"Are all caps really necessary? No need to shout at me. My hearing is perfect when the words arrive in my mind through my eyes."

"If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks."

"Wrote my way out of the hood...thought my way out of poverty! Don't tell me that knowledge isn't power. Education changes everything."

"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."

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

"Writing blooms flowers for mind, which last forever."

"When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing."

"Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would."

"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."

"It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written."

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

"A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping."

"Procrastination is opportunity's natural assassin."

"I sat down and tried to write a story."Ian MacArthur is a wonderful sweet fellow who wears glasses and peers out of them with delight."That was the first sentence. The problem was that I just couldn't think of the next one. After cleaning my room three times, I decided to leave Ian alone for a while because I was starting to get mad at him."