#writing

"I see things, that's all. Write enough stories and every shadow on the floor looks like a footprint; every line in the dirt like a secret message."

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."

"The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him...A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it."

"The one ironclad rule is that I have to try. I have to walk into my writing room and pick up my pen every weekday morning."

"And ever, as the story drainedThe wells of fancy dry,And faintly strove that weary oneTo put the subject by,"The rest next time--""It is next time!"The Happy voice cry.Thus grew the tale of Wonderland"

"Inside of all of us there is the need and the desire to be heard, to have our innermost thoughts, feelings and desires expressed for others to hear, to see and to understand. We all want to matter to someone, to leave a mark. Writers just take those thoughts, feelings and desires and express them in such a way that the reader not only reads them but feels them as well."

"Why write stories? To join the conversation."

"you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will."

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."

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

"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."

"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all of the tricks and has nothing to say."

"Writing is prayer."

"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."

"Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God."Aristotle"

"Writing is something you do alone. Its a profession for introverts who want to tell you a story but don't want to make eye contact while doing it."[Thoughts from Places: The Tour, Nerdfighteria Wiki, January 17, 2012]"

"I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."

"A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off"

"If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman."

"I go on writing so that I will always have something to read."