#writing

"Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write."

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."

"I type as fast as a ten-legged man who just had eight legs chopped off runs."

"The Book of Life, I’m still writing it—both literally and literarily. So far I’ve written the Table of Contents. Right now it’s more of a coffee table."

"[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.)"

"Definition of rock journalism: People who can't write, doing interviews with people who can't think, in order to prepare articles for people who can't read."

"You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me."

"So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say."

"Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!"

"It is the tale, not he who tells it."

"Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer."

"Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels."

"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make."

"Personally, I think so-called "common language"is more interesting and apropos than "proper English"; it's passionate and powerful in ways that "wherefore art thou ass and thy elbow"just isn't."

"She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen."

"It’s 4:00 in the afternoon and I’m just now putting on clothes. The life of a writer is as free as the pizza I just had delivered is not."

"My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see."

"The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows."

"Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for."

"Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!"