#writing

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."

"To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes."

"Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong."

"Write what should not be forgotten."

"Anything creative requires a bit of acting,and filling in blanks with imagination."

"Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs."[Time Magazine, October 31, 1977]"

"…words have been all my life, all my life--this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew…."

"Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up."

"There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that."

"But then, that’s the beauty of writing stories—each one is an exploratory journey in search of a reason and a shape. And when you find that reason and that shape, there’s no feeling like it."[Peter Wild Interviews TC Boyle, 3:AM Magazine, June 2003]"

"Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's."

"If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad."

"I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man."

"The joy of writing.The power of preserving.Revenge of a mortal hand."

"In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies."

"Normally, in anything I do, I'm fairly miserable. I do it, and I get grumpy because there is a huge, vast gulf, this aching disparity, between the platonic ideal of the project that was living in my head, and the small, sad, wizened, shaking, squeaking thing that I actually produce."

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

"For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading."

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf"came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf"and there was no wolf behind him."

"Writing well means never having to say, "I guess you had to be there."