#writing

"You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come."

"it's good for you to write down your thoughts. It'stherapeutic because it forces you to slow down and think aboutlife."

"All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate."

"I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose."

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

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."

"You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer."

"Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts."

"I want to write my own eulogy, and I want to write it in Latin. It seems only fitting to read a dead language at my funeral."

"A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film."

"writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all"

"You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves."

"If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die."

"I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit."

"The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter."

"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."

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

"Look, don't just stare at the pages,"I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book."

"The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn't."

"It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many."